gottahavacuppamocha

It’s been quite awhile, so I updated the gallery to the latest version of ZenPhoto. It’s supposed to work well with WordPress via some plugins. At the moment, it’s only a few photos, but I’ve got a ton more photos to process and add. Plus, there will also be some 3d stuff, graphic design, and so on.

I recently got a flatbed scanner that also does film and slides, so the plan is to convert old photos, slides, and maybe negatives, into digital form. Even if they don’t end up being posted (to protect the innocent ô_o), it will be nice to get them scanned in.

Hopefully this will also give me incentive to come up with another theme to unify the look of WordPress and ZenPhoto. At the very least, the thumbnails can be pulled into WordPress like this. It’s a start.

WordPress 2.8 came out yesterday afternoon and I just finished the upgrade. For the past few versions, WordPress has become one of the most user-friendly pieces of software I’ve seen. It seems well thought out and well-constructed.

WordPress has a tool called Upgrade in the Admin panel, which allows people to easily upgrade or reinstall the WordPress code. No FTP needed, since it’s as simple as clicking a button. However, it’s not problem-free.

I have this blog for myself and a test blog I use for work. I logged into this blog and there was nothing new – there was no notice about the new version. Logging into the test blog, there were two banners mentioning the upgrade. Upgrading the test blog was virtually effortless, but I was puzzled by the lack of a notice on gottahavacuppamocha. The Upgrade tool said the blog was using 2.7.1 and that it was the latest version. On a hunch, I clicked on the Re-install button. WordPress 2.7.1 was reinstalled, but when it finished, there was a notice about the 2.8 version. I clicked on the button and let it upgrade. The upgrade went easy, but I had to trick WordPress to do so.

Still, WordPress is far more user-friendly than MediaWiki. MediaWiki is easier to setup, but WordPress is easier to maintain. WP isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.

Rating:  

I’m mainly noting this for posterity, because I couldn’t find a quick answer online and finally figured it out after a day or two.

Last year I setup a MediaWiki site for work to take the place of a site one of the resident’s had setup. The site’s overall look-and-feel has to comply with standards from the School of Medicine, and this year they’ve redesigned everything. I like the school’s new design concept, since the old one was starting to feel dated. Still, it takes work to convert a site from one theme to another.

The previous design took up almost the entire width of the browser window, which means MediaWiki could easily accommodate 6 columns of image thumbnails. The downside is it’s hard coded into the MediaWiki code. It’s a variable, but not one that’s documented. Normally, variables that are meant to be changed in MediaWiki are meant to be included in the LocalSettings.php file or the includes/DefaultSettings.php file. However, in the includes/ImageGallery.php file is $mPerRow = x; near the beginning of the file, where x is the number of columns. It can be set to whatever is appropriate, so I set it to 4 for the new layout.

The moral of the tutorial is that it pays to look in unusual places if you are hunting for some hidden variable.

SixApart buys Pownce

Just as well, I guess. There’s too many social networking sites/apps, it’s hard to decide which ones are worthwhile. Since SixApart is a competitor to WordPress, I’m not interested in transitioning to their service.

I broke down and got an iPod Touch, apparently forgetting that iPods don’t read .ogg files (shakes fist at Apple, extending middle finger as well). I’ve collected hundreds of CDs over the years, and for the past six or seven years I’ve consistently ripped them as .ogg files, not .mp3’s. This weekend, I plan on re-ripping them as mp3 files so I can put them on the iPod. Since it’s supposed to be 90° F and I need to do laundry, it looks like it will be a good weekend to stay in.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been working on a new design, which I was finally able to apply. The redesign of MediaWiki didn’t take as long as thought, but it may have been that I was so into it that time flew by.

There are still some quirks, however. I forgot to add the comment form stuff for WordPress. There’s no convenient way to search on MW or WP. MediaWiki has a ton of different elements I haven’t defined in the stylesheet. I was mainly concentrating on getting the overall design to work, that I didn’t worry about the things that are infrequently used.

I’ve had the MacBook Pro for over a month now and since I have more experience with it, it’s probably ime for a progress report or something. As an aside, I keep wanting to call it a Powerbook because it reminds me of the Apple G4-era Powerbooks from a few years ago.

Typing still sucks. I’m not sure why, but I must hit some keys lighter then others when typing and the letters don’t show up. On other computers I get a lot of typos from pressing the adjacent keys, but with the MacBook the problem is random letters are missing because I didn’t press a given key hard enough. Also, Apple advertised it as having a full-sized keyboard, but they probably meant a full-sized laptop keyboard. I’ll talk about that more in a bit.

Horsepower. For most of the past month I’ve used the computer mainly for listening to music and watching DVDs. Hardly taxing for a capable machine, so I decided to put the CPU to use and installed the BOINC client for SETI. A few years ago SETI had the SETI@home project which harnessed the collective CPU power of the machines with clients installed. It was a well-known example of distributed computing. However, some people felt the idea of looking for aliens was idiotic and came up with their own distributed computing clients that worked at protein folding or gene mapping, with the hope of finding a cure for some disease. Eventually BOINC came about as a standardized client for these projects, so a person only needs to install the BOINC client, then they can choose between dozens of different projects for their computers to work on. Since I work with a lot of computers that often it idle, I installed clients on them too, but the MacBook is second fastest of them, following a quad-core Xeon server.

Sound and video are great. For a laptop, the speakers are surprisingly good, while the screen has higher resolution than my Linux PC at home. The screens at work aren’t worth mentioning. The screen is capable of HD, but the DVD will only play regular DVDs, not HD-DVD or Blu-ray. I don’t know if they can be bought as external peripherals.

The battery life doesn’t seem that good. I have Dell D630 laptop at work that was bought in September. The Dell has a smaller screen, but it also has a Centrino Duo CPU as opposed to the Core2 Duo in the Apple. Overall, they are about the same though, with only minor differences, IMHO. With both of the fully charged, I unplugged both at the same time. The Dell lasted 56 minutes before the warning LED came on and an error message popped up. The MacBook lasted 71 minutes before an error message popped up. To be fair though, I should have waited until each shut off from lack of power. I had a previous laptop that would keep goin 30 minutes after it showed a similar error message.

I said in a previous post that the Mac seems pretty worthless for web development and I stand by that for now. For the way I do web development work (i.e. with a text editor) Linux is far better. Plus, the tools in Linux are free.

I recently bought Poser after not using it for years – they don’t make a Linux version. I’m trying to rebuild a rusty skill set there. I used Poser 3 or 4 years ago and now they are on Poser 7, which came out last year. It also seems like it’s changed hands a lot over the past several years. It almost seems as if every time they come out with a new version, the company gets sold. Some company called e-frontier developed Poser 7, then the company got bought by Smith Micro for something like 6 million dollars last autumn. Sounds like a drop in the bucket for Silicon Valley prices. Poser and the Mac seem to go well together, though it helps to have a two-button mouse attached rather than using the trackpad with one button. Also, I’ve only had Poser for a few days, so the impression may change later.

It’s so-so for Blender. Using Blender it best to use one hand for the mouse and one hand for the keyboard, because Blender has a lot of hot keys or key sequences that control actions. One of the biggest reasons for using the keyboard is to use the number pad to go between alternate views, but the MacBook, with it’s full-sized laptop keyboard, the number pad is an alternate function of the main keypad. This is common with laptops, but it makes using Blender very difficult. I’ll probably try plugging in a full-sized USB keyboard and see how that works.

So far so good, but after a month I’m only giving it 3.5 of 5 stars (I’m a tough grader), because it seems mostly average.

I came across this article via Tech Dispenser and it got me briefly wondering about Slashdot’s moderation system. The author there apparently hasn’t been around Slashdot that long, otherwise she would know a bit more about how it’s evolved over the years.

Mainly, she writes about Firehose, which is a new feature for /. that shows the submission queue to logged in members and allows them to vote articles up or down (sort of like Digg, now that I think about it). Articles that are rated high enough get sent to the main page where everybody can see them.

The author, who is a PR person, insinuates that it is inevitable that Slashdot’s queue will be taken over by PR people. She writes,

“Slashdot is a valuable public square, and it is inevitable to flacks will be attracted ot it. Somehow Slashdot’s proprietors will have to find ways to prevent us from taking over.”

[typos included- MPH.]

While I’ve seen a lot of press releases and all-out ads in Slashdot’s Firehose, none of those end up on the main page. I think the Firehose is just the queue and the users have their say, but in the end it is up to the site moderators to send stories to the main page. The mods presumably know their audience and know what will interest them. Regardless of how a story is rated in Firehose, it is up to a mod to send it to the main page.

As usual, when I upgrade, something breaks. In this case, the blogroll at the bottom isn’t working. WP changed the template tags a bit so now wp_get_links doesn’t work and they suggest people use wp_list_bookmarks instead. It’s not just a name change, but apparently has some different functionality. Anyway, I can’t get it working at the moment.

I’ve been thinking about coming up with a new theme, but haven’t figured out which way I want to go with it. Brown is kind of good for a coffee/mocha motif, and there are even some themes out there that already have coffee motifs. However, it would be nice to have tome other colors too, so I have to ponder a bit.

BTW, I’ve come to the conclusion Macs are horrible development platforms, for the web at least. They don’t even come with a decent GUI text editor. It’s a sad state of affairs when Microsoft’s Notepad outshines anything Apple has to offer on their systems. There are text editors available for download or purchase, but an OS should come with a decent GUI text editor as part of the basic suite of programs. Mac OS X doesn’t even allow people to upload to FTP servers. I’m aware of the security issues of FTP, but if it allows me to download via FTP, why shouldn’t I be able to upload. At the moment, my MacBook is relegated to being a jukebox and DVD player. It’s very good at those things.

A week ago I did an upgrade of the site to the latest version of WordPress, but I kept getting an error Fatal Error: PHP Allowed Memory Size Exhausted then it would give the name of a script and a line number. Browsing around the net, I was able to figure out the problem and find some solutions.

The problem is an issue with the default setup of PHP, where is has a memory limit of 8 MB. This isn’t necessarily a big issue, but some more sophisticated scripts require more memory of the server, and since PHP is limiting how much memory is allocated, it returns a fatal error if a script wants too much.

The first solution is to change the memory_limit section of the php.ini file on the server. However, since this site is hosted, I don’t have access to that for security reasons. Also, most hosts are not inclined to change those setting for fear they will break other sites they host. Makes sense.

The second solution is to add the line php_value memory_limit 32M to the .htaccess file in the root directory of my site. I did this and it didn’t work. I tried it with different memory values with no success. I tried using M, MB, and Mb, also with no success. This was really frustrating because the FAQ for my hosting service said to change values in the .htaccess file as an alternative to making changes to the php.ini file.

The third solution is to add ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ‘32M’); to the top of each script that might require extra memory. Depending on how your scripts are setup, you might be able to get away with adding this to a header file or template file. It didn’t seem to work for me, until I added it to the upgrade.php file for WordPress. It’s not a very elegant solution, but it works. I actually added 64MB because I was frustrated.

I still don’t know why the second solution didn’t work, unless the server is ignoring that portion of the .htaccess file. I can’t say I’m 100% pleased about it, but if it happens in the future I will know what to do.