Merry Christmas to all of you 🙂

If you got the following error in WordPress when saving, auto-saving, or commenting on a post :
Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to submissions.ask.com:80 in /path/to/blog/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1150 then keep reading 😉

A cool feature of WordPress I’ve just discovered : delayed posts.

As you might have noticed, WordPress 2.5 is out, so I’ve just upgraded this blog.

Till now all I can tell is that the admin interface has changed a bit. Oh and there is a system to upgrade plugins with one click, which is way cool. Otherwise pretty much the same good old WordPress.

The upgrade went smoothly, just as for any other previous release and everything seems to be running just fine. However, at the first glance, the blog seems a bit slower than before the upgrade … (maybe this is not related to the upgrade … I’ll have to check this out).

It is high time I give out a bit of link love for those blogs I always rush to when there’s a new post !

In no particular order !

1. Lifehacker : Software reviews, tips, and every hack you need to enhance your productivity
2. l’Oeil du web : (In French) Half technical, half fun blog of a friend who moved to the south of France
3. Aashiyana – Santanu and Pamela : Life, travels, civilization blog of a friend couple who moved back to India
4. Terminally Incoherent : Rants and comments, technical stuff, reviews
5. My SysAd Blog — UNIX : Tips about OpenSolaris
6. Get Rich Slowly : Financial tips for everyday life
7. Wise Bread : Financial tips, getting the most of your money
8. Ririan Project : Everyday life tips
9. OpenBSD Journal : Official news for the OpenBSD “free as air” Unix system.
10. OSNews : News about the world of operating systems

Hmm, that’s it for now ! This post to be a “thank you” for all the authors behind those blogs who write great posts and, well, ruin my productivity 😉

Wow, this was a big work : I moved to a new WordPress theme with 3 columns which is, I hope, much more readable.

I quite enjoy the result, and I learnt a bit about AdSense, SEO, CSS and WordPress on the way so all in all, I would say this was worth all the efforts and the time I’ve put in this.

Let me know what you think about the new theme, and if you see more ways to improve it !

Here are the most important things to remember.

In case you read this blog only through the RSS feeds, you might not have noticed the few new pages on the left hand menu bar. Those pages are dynamically generated by pulling the RSS feed of my del.icio.us bookmarks for specific tag combinations (like wordpress+plugin+must).

Feel free to have a look from time to time, to check for modifications !

For now, you’ll find :

• a book list
• a list of my most used Firefox plugins
• a list of y favorite free (like beer) softwares
• and my favorite wordpress plugins

And in case you wonder, those pages are generated thanks to the wonderful inlineRSS wordpress plugin, which makes pulling RSS feeds from your blog damn easy.

My name is Stéphane Kattoor.

I live in France near Paris.
I work as a Systems Engineer and I am a computer hobbyist.

My main interests are around open source, operating systems (mostly Unix but Windows as well), coding (mostly in Perl these days), home automation, and many other things …

This site is a placeholder for things I learn/discover during my work or hobbies and I consider (hopefully) worth sharing.

Hello,

My name is Stephane Kattoor, I work as an IT Engineer, and I created this blog with the idea to use it to store the little technical tips or hints I find in my every day work … with the hope it will help me and perhaps some others as well !

Come from time to time, I plan to keep it updated !

Stephane