Having got the car back, everything was going smoothly for a few months.. 

Until I turned the key, and smelled fuel.

Knowing instantly what had happened, I opened the bonnet, and found a spray of petrol shooting out from a gnawed hole in the injector line, to the centimeter where it had been chewed out 3 months before.  Not happy.  

So, the car's back at the shop, the shed's been emptied out and the surrounding garden cleared of old piles of tree clippings and mowed grass - with the help of a 4 cubic meter skip which we filled to the brim.  

Baits were laid, and after the first few days, they stopped disappearing overnight and the little piles of rat crap began to change to a weird iridescent green color, similar to that of the baits themselves.  Finally, yesterday, no baits were taken.

Meanwhile, Brian's car's in the back yard.  For the first few days, whenever the baits were taken, we'd find them arranged neatly under his bonnet, sizable chunks taken out of the blocks and some of his wiring.  Nothing fatal as far as the car's concerned, but we're not risking being completely sans-auto, so it stays there until mine's back and we can take his in for repairs.

Sneaky little bastards.

I've been running Eclipse PDT for my PHP work for a while now, and during my down time discovered how to get it working with XDebug.

Since starting at the new job though, we've had a little bit of a budget to spend on things like training and professional tools, so I got a copy of Zend Studio for Eclipse.  It's just like PDT but with a few extra helpers and templates, and it's supported - which is always nicer than having to Google for answers all the time.

Only problem is, they appear to have disabled support for XDebug (in version 6.01 at least).  I'm not sure why - maybe it was to keep their support costs down, or maybe it was to encourage users to buy their full platform and toolkit.  Whatever the reason, I missed XDebug, so had to bring it back.

So I hunted around and found a solution for it.  Fortunately, some of the users on Zend's Devzone had come up with a solution, which I Mac-ified.  I've added it to the tip page for your viewing pleasure.

Back from Bali, to 21 degree, wet days in Brizzy.  B's back at work and I've got a week before I start at Blue Dog, so I'm thinking of things to do to take up the time.  

A bit of gym work to drop the holiday kilos, and maybe a little computer time to get the brain back to work.  Then there's the garden, which, thanks to last week's downpour, is now soaking wet and sprouting weeds everywhere.  Too wet to cut the lawn, so I'll probably have to do something indoors instead.

Brisbane to Singapore went reasonably well.  B lasted most of the flight but the travel sickness caught up with him in the last 10 minutes, so he's taking time out in one of Changi's many chillout zones while I wander around the terminal.

I wish all airports gave out free net access - especially the amount of free net that theyhave here - free terminals aplenty!

We're out of here in a couple of hours, touching down in Denpasar at 9.30 tonight.  Transfers all arranged to the hotel, so as long as the flight's smooth, it should be an easy run to bed.

In swotting up for my Zend Certified Engineer exam, I decided that I should really knuckle down and learn a bunch of design patterns if I'm ever going to consider myself a true OO coding professional.

I picked up my first Mac, a 15" Powerbook G4, in 2005.  In recent times however it's been feeling a little long in the tooth - especially compared to Brian's Macbook and my iMac.  It's been a great laptop though, and being out of work at the moment I prefer being out and about to sitting at my desk.  

So I wanted to give it an overhaul.  I've had a Leopard family license since November and have already upgraded the other machines, and yesterday finally wiped the powerbook clean and ran the upgrade.

Definitely a good idea - the machine's a hell of a lot zippier.  I'm not sure how much of that is due simply to having a clean disk and how much is the OS upgrade itself, but I was surprised.  Eclipse runs really smoothly on the 1.5 Java install (again, not sure if Tiger had 1.5 but it's definitely faster now), and after you run through a couple of reboots due to the installation of all the accumulated software upgrades in the last 6 months, the GUI is definitely nice and snappy.

I'm currently waiting for Macports to install Apache - the raw compilation process of course takes as long as ever on the G4.  Time will tell how zippy the AAMP stack is after installation.

The list of software I've installed:

• Eclipse PDT 1.0.3 - I'm really getting into this as a PHP dev environment (after a lot of false starts with Eclipse over the years)
• Adium 1.2.5 - the best IM client out there.
• Firefox 3.0 rc1 - nice and zippy.  Needed for PHP debugging.  Still using Safari for day to day browsing unless Firefox really wows me (FF2 was just too slow for every day use and I've got used to Safari now
• Inquisitor 3 - plugin for Safari that enhances the search box (gives you alternative search engines, displays results instantly, Spotlight style)
• SafariStand - great little tab preview sidebar, plus Firefox style "find as you type" function
• HetimaWebThumbnail - by the SafariStand guys.  Gives coverflow-style history browsing to Safari 
• 1Password - Remembers all my web passwords and syncs across my computers.  I actually paid for this one
• Quicksilver - the quickest way to do stuff without taking your hands off the keyboard.  I'm surprised Apple hasn't incorporated this into the OS yet.
• Visor - by the Quicksilver guys at Blacktree.  I only just discovered this one - it gives you an instant pull-down auto-hide Terminal at a keyboard shortcut, which traverses your Spaces.  Very nifty!
• Macports - essential for easy installation of open source software.  As an old FreeBSD user, it's nice to have a familiar package manager like this.

A couple of configuration touches I like to make:

Keyboard shortcuts (System Prefs -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts):

Disable the "Hide and show Front Row" shortcut 

Application Keyboard Shortcuts -> All Applications:

Select Previous Tab: Cmd - [ 

Select Next Tab: Cmd - ]

Application Keyboard Shortcuts -> Safari:

After stalling for months, I got online yesterday at 2.30pm to find a couple of mounting brackets for my old GPS, after I broke the old bracket in February.  After a quick bit of Googling, I stumbled upon Calculator King, in Melbourne, and ordered the parts.  

Cut to lunch time today, and the postman brings me my kit.  That's a 21 hour total delivery time!  Outstanding work guys - I thoroughly recommend them next time you're looking for a phone/PDA/GPS or accessories.

Since I've changed blog addresses, I need to get this blog re-established with Technorati.  Here's the link to my Technorati Profile.

Finally, a practical use for CoverFlow!  I found this little CoverFlow history plugin included with the latest release of SafariStand. Really helpful for finding websites you've visited by look, when you can't remember the exact name or URL of the site. 

WTF?!! 

For the first time today, I turned the ignition key in my trusty 307cc and it turned over but refused to start.  That, and the strong smell of petrol alerted me to the fact that something must be wrong.

I got out of the car to discover I was standing in a fresh pool of petrol.

Opening the bonnet, I quickly discovered the problem: a rat had chewed through the main fuel line, my windscreen washer fluid reservoir and other plasticy bits! I've never heard of this before - WTF?!

I wonder how much this is going to cost me... 

So, I'm finally getting my act together and building a real website for myself that contains a little bit more than just a blog.  I've done a lot of work with Joomla lately, so it seemed a pretty simple choice to use it to build my site.

At first I thought about keeping WP around for blogging, and Joomla for everything else, but getting the same template working under both systems was too much like hard work, so the next choice was to add a blog to Joomla. 

Mojoblog sounded like the best option, as it basically gives you Wordpress inside Joomla.  Only problem is, she don't work with Joomla 1.5, which is what I'm using - having met with the honchos from the Joomla team last week. Apparently, its author is working on a 1.5 version, but there's nothing out there at the moment.  Hence I've had to look around for an alternative, and I found it in Jooblog.  It's got pretty basic functionality at the moment, but it looks like the author's fairly actively developing it.  So, I've decided to gamble on it becoming feature-complete enough to use going forward.  In the meantime, the old blog will sit at my old site until I can find a convenient way of back-importing the articles into this system.

Lots of news this week, professionally and travel-wise, but as I sit here watching Die Hard 4 with a big glass of Shiraz Malbec, frankly I'm too tired and emotional to write about it at the moment.  Stay tuned!