Click to enlarge:

Poster for a barber-shop singing camp aimed at (American!) teenagers. Gaby was in charge of the hairdo’s and the typography whilst I spent a Saturday afternoon drawing open mouths of various persuasions. Fun!

My favourite is the blue-scalped Goth, though it must be said the dorky “Will Someone Release Me From These Dumbass Glasses” kid has a certain je ne sais quoi as well.

You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning. And while you know a lot, you don’t act like a know it all. You’re open to learning you’re wrong.

You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more. You’re naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises.

Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking. (But they’re not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!)

You excel in: Higher education

You get along best with: The Comma

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

Behold, the censored version!

Be sure to click the above drawing for full nudity. ;-)

Oh, and here’s how Gabriela messed around with it:

I simply love the way she plunders my catalogue of minuscule doodles and dresses them up into something actually worthwhile publishing! Have a look:

… and my personal favourite:

Fair enough. First draft, pen and ink:

Scan! Colorize! We’ve about half an hour to go. This is where Gaby’s talent comes in:

Print! Glue! Scissors! Viola.

Happy birthday Isken. :)

It’s funny cuz it’s true! (Via Polskaya)

Seemed like the perfect timing to upgrade Gaby’s weblog to WP’s latest version. Did an Extreme MakeOver™ of the theme while at it. Gabriela got me kick-started with a very inspirational autumn inspired header image:

… upon which it was only a matter of picking colors, crunching html tags, css declarations and php commands:

I’m quite satisfied with the way it turned out… Yet I can’t wait for spring to arrive again. Guess I’m not an autumn person.

Back in 2005 I set up Zappa Wiki Jawaka, a wiki (you guessed it) dedicated to (you guessed it) Frank Zappa. Grabbed the latest MediaWiki package and patiently went through all the loops of setting up a database, configuring php files, customizing, etc.

No more than one month later, Dreamhost made MediaWiki a one-click install. Instead of having to fiddle around for hours, you now had your own wiki at the push of one button — and were able to upgrade it at the push of that same button. Alas, there I was, stuck with my own homegrown 1.4.2 install which didn’t allow for one-click upgrading.

Adding insult to injury, along came the spam- and vandalbots. My poor outdated wiki was taking a constant beating, and there was nothing I could do about it, because every single extension I tracked down required a more recent version. There was only one solution: bite the bullet and upgrade.

Here’s what I did:

1. Make a back-up of all the wiki’s current files
2. Make a copy of the database for testing purposes
3. Set up a new subdomain running PHP5.2 for testing purposes
4. Did a one-click install of Mediawiki 1.11.0 on the testing domain from within Dreamhost’s admin panel
5. Pointed the install to the outdated database, hoping it too would be upgraded in the process.

No dice. The installer ran okay for about half a second, then choked, complaining that it couldn’t find a certain table within the database.

MediaWiki’s online manual to the rescue: a huge forest of words and links where you tend to get lost within a minute or so. A couple of hours and liters of cafeine later, I came across a page that looked like it had the answer. It said: go to your maintenance folder, look for two files (upgrade1_5.php and update.php) and run them.

Hurrah! I quickly pointed my browser to upgrade1_5.php and was greeted with the following message: “this script must be run from the command line”.

Uh oh. Command line. Wargames, anyone?

We’re now a couple of hours later, I’ve got some basic shell commands under my belt from various tutorials and I’m staring at the Terminal. Time for the real magic:


ssh me@mydomain.com
me@mydomain.com password: mypassword
$[server] ls
$[server] cd wiki.killuglyradio.com/maintenance/
$[server] php upgrade1_5.php
$[server] php update.php


… upon which I re-ran the installer, and was greeted with a shiny “Installation complete!” message.

Hello, one-click upgrade!

It’s amazing what a little bit of Photoshop fiddling can do to an image. Pictured above is my sister’s little girl. Don’t let it fool you: she’s a real rebel :)