It’s quite remarkable!  AGP’s three weeks in a row!!

This week’s show is a bit different in that we’ve scrapped our regular show format to take a moment to interview our musically-inclined geeky guest, Chopper Newt from The Lizards From Afar.

Sit back and have a listen.  Its a pretty interesting interview, and a nice break from our regular show format.

Aussie Geek Podcast #009.

Old News? Yea, kinda.  I forgot to actually hit the publish button on this post a few days back…

For those of you who’ve been following the development of the next iteration of WordPress you already know that 2.7 Beta 1 was released last Friday night.

WP 2.7 features some really great refinements to the admin panel which not only make it more useful, they also serve as the building blocks for the next few generations of WordPress.

I’ve been messing around with 2.7 for the last month or so on my WP sandbox and it’s been very interesting to watch the evolution of the menuing system.

I’ll be drawing up a full review for the AGP blog which I’ll post once the full release happens.

This past Friday I joined Jeffro for another episode of WordPress Weekly.  This week we had the good fortune to interview Automattic’s usability maven Jane Wells.

Jane is one of the minds behind some of the dramatic new changes to the admin interface for WordPress 2.7.  Recently Jane also posted a poll and a survey to garner some feedback on the new WordPress Beta that was released on Halowe’en night.

Give this week’s show a listen and check out some of the great answers to the questions that we came up with.

Geeks.  Aussie Geeks.

The long awaited seventh installment of the Aussie Geek Podcast is released.  This should be the last time I edit and post-produce a show for a while.  I have enjoyed it, and learned a whole lot about podcast post-production, and even about this show that I’ve been a part of for the last 18 months.

This week on the show we covered some economics including Yahoo! layoffs, iPhone sales and the effects of the tech slowdown on startups in Europe.

We also touched on an app to moderate WordPress comments from your desktop and a graphics package to create stunning high dynamic range (HDR) images which works on all platforms.

At the end of the show we’ve got the first in a series of musical appearances by the Lizards from Afar, and the show closes out with a blooper segment that’s sure to make Dave retalliate in episode 8.

Go have a listen to the Aussie Geek Podcast #007 :: Armchair Economists.  Better yet subscribe to the show in iTunes or directly via the show feed.

OK, for many of you out there, this is probably so basic you didn’t even need to search for it.  That said, I figured I’d post it anyway (partly because I’ve been so lax about blogging recently).

If you’ve ever wanted to have OS X show file extensions for all files, all the time, it’s a very simple process.

1. Click on any finder (or the desktop)
2. Select Preferences from the Finder menu
3. Click on the Advanced button
4. Check off the Show all file extensions box
5. Close the Finder Preferences window

Voila! All is revealed.  Wasn’t that easy?  It probably took you longer to read this than to actually make the change.

If you’re a fan of being able to run Windows applications on your Mac, listen up! CodeWeavers Windows-to-Mac application CrossOver is being offered for FREE today only.

If you’re interested in the offer, visit the CodeWeavers website to sign up.

If you want to read more about the background of this story, check out Michael Rose’s post on TUAW.

The long and the short of it: You have George W. Bush to thank (sorta) for your opportunity to buy free software.

I’ve decided to start a little experiment.  Over the next 7 days, I’m going to try to get a new wordpress blog on a new domain from a PageRank of 0, to at least a PageRank of 1.  If I can get this done, I’ll renew the domain.  If not, I’ll probably let it lapse.

It’s a pretty simple proposition really, I’ll put together what I know about SEO with regular posts to the site.  Hopefully between now and next Friday night I’ll be able to get the site on Google’s radar.

What are my chances?  No idea, but you can check out the post explaining the Google - Wordpress experiment on the new site at kickjoey.com.

The long-time running Digital Photography Show on The Podcast Network is no more.  The show’s hosts have been locked out of their website without a chance to post their final show or farewells.

After notifying TPN that they intended to leave the network, the show’s hosts Scott & Michael were locked out of the website and TPN refused to post their final show because it didn’t meet “quality standards”.  I find it hard to believe that a show’s quality would suddenly tank on the very last episode.

It’s sad to see such behaviour from TPN’s CEO Cameron Reilly. Things like this don’t make other shows want to help promote TPN’s content, and certainly don’t win many friends in the podcasting community at large.

Scott tells us why you’ll never hear the farewell episode of the Digital Photography Show on his blog, and subscribe there to keep current on the next incarnation of the DPS.

Good luck guys!

It didn’t take me forever to find this, but I felt it was simple enough that it bore re-posting.  If you’ve ever wanted to disable anonymous editing of articles in a mediawiki-based wiki (the ones that look & feel like wikipedia…) there’s a simple one-line fix:

In your LocalSettings.php file, add this to the bottom:
#Disable Anonymous Editing
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

It should be noted that this fix is for MediaWiki 1.5 and later. If you want some ideas on additional things that you can do with MediaWiki security, check out the MediaWiki Manual.

I just got back from the BarCamp Vancouver 2008 networking party.  This is the meet & greet prior to the actual unconference which takes place tomorrow down at Granville Island.

It was great to see a few familiar faces like Rebecca and Raul.

I also got to meet some of the folks who I’d only known online.  Duane, John, John & Andy.  Looking forward to meeting lots of other great people tomorrow.

I did forget one thing tonight: Business Cards.  However, I did manage to find a few spare sheets of my Avery business card blanks tonight.  I also discovered (somewhat to my surprise) that Google Docs supports Avery business card templates.

sample business card from google docs

The implementation isn’t quite as slick as MS-Word, but it will more than do in a pinch.  I managed to whip up this snazzy little number in a matter of minutes.  Now I feel more prepared for tomorrow.  Hopefully Dave doesn’t mind that I borrowed the show logo, I promise I’ll promote the show!