Generally speaking I don’t use facebook. I have an account because some people insist on trying to contact me on it so at least I get the messages and can tell them to send me a bloody email. I have three blogs (all with contact details on), an email address, mobile number, Twitter feed, Skype address and regularly use MSN Messenger.
As such I don’t feel I need facebook. The only thing it does is open me up to more arseholes I went to school with trying to get back in touch with me. As a very general rule, if I’m not in touch with them now it’s very likely I don’t want to be.
Anyway, for those who didn’t know facebook today/yesterday (not too sure, don’t really care) allowed all of their users to nab a personalised URL for their facebook page. There was huge demand for this – in fairness it’s better to tell someone your page is at “…facebook.com/SteveJones” rather than “…facebook.com/SteveJones1234”.
After a few hours they’d registered over three million of the things. The load on the servers must have been enormous, and credit to them there was no slowdown or system failure. Needless to say, the team were all in place to monitor the temperatures, wires and servers to ensure it went well. Mashable! has a good story on this from which I’ve pinched the photo below.
As I said, I don’t give a toss about facebook, but I can at least say that someone there has taste. Can you spot why?
Courtesy of a huge pile of Amazon vouchers and a dodgy-looking hinge on my trusty old Acer TravelMate, I decided to splash out on one of those new-fangled “netbook” things. As well as a chance to reduce the size and weigh tof my luggage, it was also an excuse to see what the amount of cash I paid for the laptop 3½ years ago would get me now.
After some checking and hunting online, I decided on the Asus Eee PC 1000HE. In shiny black. Well if I got it in white, people might think it’s an Apple. Ick.
I went for this one – a little more expensive than I’d originally planned for a few reasons. First up, almost £100-worth of the aforementioned vouchers. They offset the increase in price. Also, the unit has had great reviews online and came with Windows XP rather than Vista *spit*. 1Gb of RAM should be enough for my needs and 160Gb of hard drive space gives me the same as my current laptop.
A huge selling point is the staggering 9½ hours of battery life using the “Super Hybrid Engine”. This means you can only expect this under Windows as it uses proprietary software to manage the CPU usage. Various reviews have confirmed this figure as perfectly achievable, with one managing over 10 hours of light use. Hammering it with videos still gives over 5 hours.
The only thing missing is an optical drive. I used my laptop CD burner to back up all my photos when I was travelling (and charged a beer to do it for other people, too) but this isn’t an option with a netbook. None of them have an internal CD-R which is understandable. Given the prevelance of cybercafes charging a couple of dollars to burn CDs, this isn’t as much of an issue as it was when I was travelling long term so it’s something I can manage without.
One thing to note for people who like to upgrade is that the memory is a single stick, and there is only one slot for it. Hence upgrading RAM will involve ditching the existing DIMM.
I’ve not had a huge play with it so far, mainly downloading Firefox, the new Skype and so on. Oh, and using it to watch the live feed from the Download Festival web site while I do other things on my laptop.
However, so far it seems fine. The keyboard’s good to type on and the screen’s nice and bright. It’s only 10″ but it’s perfectly usable. It’s easy to change the resolution on the fly so if you have any windows that don’t fit on the screen in the default 1024×600 you can flip to a scrolling 1024×768.
I tested Skype which showed that the condenser microphones are pretty good and the webcam picture is crisp and updates quickly. The speakers – very well tested by the likes of Down, DevilDriver and Hatebreed, aren’t bad either. A little rattly if the volume’s too high, but acceptable on a small box like this.
Connectivity is good with three USB2.0 ports. There’s also a VGA output socket, and separate holes for external microphone and speakers/headphones. As an added bonus there is also a slot for an SD card – ideal if your digital camera used these.
The wi-fi is 802.11b/g/n which is as good as it gets these days. I’ve not been able to test the “n” as my router is only “g” but I’m sure I’ll reap the benefits in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.
Once I’ve got all the XP setup complete, I’ll be repartitioning the hard drive and installing Ubuntu alongside it. By all accounts this will work well, though I don’t expect the battery life to be as good for the reasons mentioned above.
Well, dinner now calls me so I’m off for something from the chippie. More updates on the Eee as I do more with it. But so far I’m impressed.
Full credit for this solution goes to “vtroia” on the WordPresssupport forum. However, just to ensure the information’s available in more places I’m popping it here.
Symptoms: When trying to use the inbuilt auto-upgrade of WordPress, you simply get a message stating:
Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress- …
The ending will vary depending on the version you’re trying to update to. Nothing else happens, or it’s just damn slow. There’s no way to tell.
My host is 1and1. I noticed others on the original problem thread had the same one, though I suspect the problem could relate to others as well.
Solution: You need to edit the relevant .htaccess file on your server. This is one of those “for crying out loud, make sure you know what you’re doing” situations, like hacking the registry. Do ensure you have a backup and do ensure you only make the following changes. Make sure you change the correct one, as well.
The problem is that WordPress is either using the wrong version of PHP on the server, or is confused as there is more than one available and it doesn’t know which to pick. Regardless, the solution is to tell it to use PHP5.
To do this, locate and edit the .htaccess file (you may have to download it, edit it and re-upload) and add the following lines:
# Ensure PHP5 being used
# For WordPress auto upgrade
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php
The first two are only comments, but it’s useful to know what code is doing.
Once saved, retry your upgrade. I found that I now get a pause of around 15-20 seconds when I click on the “Upgrade Now” button, the screen refreshes and the upgrade is done.
Afterwards: Change it back again, or at least add “#” to the bottom two lines. I found that by not doing this, some functionality in WordPress was jiggered. Specifically, the display and edit of the Permalink underneath the post title as you’re entering/editing it. I’m also still missing the “Recommended Link” section from Zemanta but only on Firefox – it’s reappeared when I use Chrome since I restored the .htaccess file. This could be a caching thing, so I’m going to do some more checking and will update this post as and when I find a fix.
Update: The links issue was a Zemanta problem which they’ve swiftly repaired. However, I am now left with a half-functional dashboard page. This isn’t Zemanta – I’ve disabled it to check. I get only the left column of my opening admin screen and none of the pop-up menus work. As soon as I click on one of the non-popped-up buttons, I go to the relevant default screen and everything works again. It’s only the main admin screen. Gah.
Update 2: Seems there are a lot of issues with plug-ins and WordPress 2.8. If you can, check your plug-ins for compatibility before upgrading. However, note that some of the ones I’m having issues with claim to be compatible with this new release.
Update 3: I re-enabled the lines in the .htaccess and it’s resolved most of the issues. And created one tiny one that seems to be ironing itself out. By which I mean sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. Bizarre.
Just as a disclaimer, it ain’t my fault if you screw your .htaccess by doing this. Be sure you know what you’re doing before to edit it. As long as you only enter the lines shown, as far as I’m aware it will not cause any problems that you can’t sort out by removing the lines again but every installation and setup is different!
I just found a useful little freeware program called Prey which may be useful for laptops, or indeed any computer. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac and it’s open source.
What it does is simple. Should your machine be stolen, if the thief logs in (this is the only pitfall, in my opinion) the program will automatically email you a load of details every few minutes. These include its IP address, wi-fi network name, screenshots and – if you have a webcam attached – a picture from it. With luck that may even capture the thief.
How does the machine know it’s stolen and not being used by the real user? When it fires up, Prey checks for the existance of a web page. Any web page, it’s customisable. I’ve told it to look for a page on my blog called “stolen”, so should I find my laptop’s gone walkies then I create that page on my blog. If the page exists then Prey starts emailing details.
It’s only on v0.2 so it’s pretty much beta but it works as far as I can test it under Ubuntu. I’ve not installed it on XP or Win7 as yet. The only thing that’s not clear about the Ubuntu version is how to change the configuration once it’s installed – there’s no menu item or command to run. Go to the directory where you’ve installed it (default is /usr/share/prey) and edit the “config” file with your choice of text editor. It’s well-commented.
As I mentioned above, Prey will only trigger once a user has logged in. As it’s installed as root and runs under root’s crontab (or in the case of Windows as a system process) it will execute no matter what user logs in. Of course, if you have only password-protected accounts then a lot of people will just shrug their shoulders, format it and sell it on.
Hidden in the config file is what looks like a feature that’s not yet implemented – to create a dummy “guest” account with no password that will lure a thief into having a snoop and therefore giving Prey a chance to execute. Of course, you could to this manually. Prey will automatically attempt to locate the nearest publicly-accessible wi-fi connection should it be activated in a bid to get that information out to you.
It’s a teeny program, may or may not help… but for the effort it takes to install it I reckon it’s worthwhile. Of course, I’d also recommend opening the machine up and scrawling your postcode in indelible marker or UV pen somewhere as well. And registering the serial number with Immobilise (or Immobilise in the US).
After running the default WordPress theme since transferring this blog over from Blogger, I’ve finally found a nice 3-column theme that I can tinker with. It’s called Atahualpa and you can get the latest release from BytesForAll‘s web page.
I’m having a little fun with it – I’d like to have the categories across the top, but it won’t sort them into alphabetical order (although it’s meant to) and I have too many of the things anyway.
Please do let me know if you like it or if there are any niggles. Next (tedious) job is to categorise 650+ posts that I wrote in the days before categories and tags. Argh.
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