Owner: IT Werkz Sometimes URL:http://itwerkzsometimes.com Join Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:29:11 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: The joys of boothing software around the park before letting the hapless user have a look at it Site statistics:Click here
Wordpress plugins and a very confusing book 2007-03-13 11:49:44 Tried a few plugins for wordpress blogs in an attempt to replicate this blog. Seems quite straightforward. Find plugin, download it, unzip it, FTP it to the plugins folder on the server and go to the plugins page on Wordpress
and activate it.
Tried a few and a couple worked and a couple failed miserably. I don’t think I was attempting anything too adventurous just a hit counter. No doubt I wasn’t ’running it right’. Will try more later. I’m going to have fun with this.
The book I have been using is just too confusing. Now I have no doubt that the writer is an expert in the Wordpress world but the distinctions in the book for the processing of Wordpress.com blogs, hosted blogs and own hosted blogs are not clear at all. The section on servers was interesting but sent me down a few dead ends. It gave me the impression that I needed to install both Apache and MySQL which I duly did.
Wrong, you only need to do that if you are running your own server. If yo
Got the full version of Wordpress working 2007-03-12 12:30:29 Yup finally got the full version
of Wordpressworking
on the server. Exported this blog to an XML file and imported it back into the new version. Oddly when I was looking at the Wordpress area for importing from other blogs I don’t remember seeing an option for importing a blog hosted at wordpress.com itself. There was an option for an RSS feed so I fed it the XML export file.
The import thrashed around for a couple of minutes and finally told me it had successfully imported everything. The good news was that all of these entries were successfully imported along with the pictures. The bad news was that, and I’m sure it was my fault somewhere, every picture was also imported as a separate blog entry, all of the comments were lost as were the categories. Worse still was that every entry, including all of the dud entries for the separate pictures were given unique categories, all being blank, a total of about 500.
Removed all of the picture entries easilyy enough, created the
Agile development, programmers nirvana 2007-03-07 11:49:55 Boy do they do Agile
development here. Incremental releases all over the place. Changes to requirements coded at the drop of a hat. They do Scrum too. Quick little chatty meetings, ‘you finished that code you were going to write yesterday?’, ’can you do that amendment by tomorrow?’. This is developers heaven.
Not that anybody on the development team knows they are doing Agile. They almost certainly haven’t even heard of it. Scrum? That’s a rugby thing, right? No this is development from 20 years ago which just sounds like Agile and Scrum.
When a program has got some unexpected features then the documentation is amended to justify these features. Even though it’s baselined. They find an excuse to review the baselined document and make all sorts of amendments to justify all of the odd behaviours. Not that they will let you know that the documentation has been changed. In fact that’s the last thing they want, you kept in the loop. No it&r Read more:Agile development
Vista’s shelf life of 5 years, Wow 2007-03-07 09:30:09 According to Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott Microsoft will only be supporting the domestic version of Vista
for 5 years.
Aren’t they going to keep supporting XP for that same period too? Therefore nobody has to upgrade to, the barely working, Vista and we can all stick with XP till Microsoft’s next attempt at an Operating System is unleashed and no doubt trashed, providing their PC’s last that long.
Paul Thurrott also said recently that Vienna, the next one, will be shipping in about 18 months. Well that’s a nail firmly battered into the coffin of Vista.
Latest podcast listening pleasure - Perl 2007-03-06 12:57:12 Have started listening to a Perl programming language podcast and it’s good. I do find that listening to several podcasts on the same subject over a period of time does, just, start to give you an in-site into their world. So for the next couple of weeks I’ll hoover up all the Perl podcasts I can.
It’s also interesting hearing these developers attitudes to other programming languages or development platforms. The Perl guy was having a go at Java weenies and how bored he was at a Java conference. He also had a swipe at the Python people as being ’way too serious’. Interesting.
Also some Perl people are worried about the popularity and success stories of the PHP people and how he thought that in 5 years they would have caught up with the Perl worlds environment.
The .NET 3.0 guys are always having a swipe at the Java guys too. I’m sure if I listened to enough podcasts on enough diverse platforms I’ll be convinced the IT world was at war. Won Read more:listening pleasure
Getting Wordpress working on my hosting server, and ain’t that a barrel of laughs 2007-03-04 21:43:58 This isn’t for the squeemish. Signed up with a web hosting company, got a username and password and logged on. Stop.
Gee, what are all of these icons for. And there’s a lot of them. Did actually start a blog in an early attempt to mimic this one. Was displayed very few template options and which didn’t include the one I use for this blogg. Tried another template just to see what would happen. Imported the XML file that I’d exported from here and needless to say that didn’t work too good. The template that I did use didn’t include all of the tags for this page, none of those available did, so the import sort of squeezed the controls and text all over the place, most of the pictures were missing and all of the categories went west just for the helluvit.
Did a search for the template I use here, found one, downloaded it, unzipped it and FTP’d it up to my hosted server
. Still couldn’t find it when amending the blog. Phoned the helpdesk Read more:hosting server
, Wordpress
, working
Taking the plunge to host blog on ISP’s server 2007-03-02 12:02:10
Have been running this blog on wordpress.com for the past six months and now realise that this is a bit of a noddy way of running a blog. For a start I’m not able to use a lot of features that would be available to me if it was hosted on my ISP’s server
. Did a search for web hosting which resulted in a torrent of sites.
There were many very competitively priced in the US which were very tempting but if I had to phone up a support desk over there it could be costly. Found some UK hosting companies and they looked good but not quite as cheap. Phoned BT, my ISP, to see what they offered but when I mentioned databases they were a bit flummoxed. Obviously I rang the wrong person but with a company that size its almost inevitable. Got a feeling if I persevered that they’d want to sell me an eCommerce package and charge a lot more. Forget BT.
The SQL Server problems, where I said that it wasn’t completely un-installing itself from Vista has been made right by a r Read more:plunge
, Taking
Having fun with Wordpress plug-ins 2007-03-15 10:52:16 I was looking for a hit counter plug-in for the version of this blog that I have started writing using the full version of Wordpress
at www.itwerkzsometimes.com (gee, why’d you call it that). I have tried several plug-ins and some work OK and others are hopeless. I installed a hit counter plug-into the sidebar.php file, which should display the hit count in the left-hand sidebar but instead, didn’t do that, but knocked out the right side bar completely. The file that generated the right side bar, right-sidebar.php still existed and I don’t think had been amended but I couldn’t be certain.
Don’t panic. As I hadn’t amended right-sidebar and therefore had nothing to lose I re FTP’d the right-sidebar.php file up to the server so if the site counter had trashed it in any way then that would freshen it up again. Did it work? No.
Removed the site counter code from sidebar.php (the left sidebar) and back comes the right hand side bar. I bet if I con Read more:Having
Dead projects in perpetual design hell 2007-03-16 11:45:04 I recently spoke of a friend of mine and his company where projects stall for various reasons. They have several projects on the go at the moment and their salesmen are getting lots more customers. This is obviously pleasing the brass but I’m not convinced they can deliver as they don’t appear to have the manpower. In fact they have more salesmen than they have people to populate some of their newer projects so heaven knows where those projects are going.
They are taking on staff at a rate of knots but getting them up to speed is taking time. They have even taken on some contractors, which is new to the company and also, unhelpfully, they are first time contractors. So the new contractors have to be told to get limited companies, get an accountant, register for VAT, how to invoice and what can they can claim as expenses. The company, who has never taken on any contractors before, don’t even know how to write out a contract yet. No doubt there will be a certain amount Read more:design
, perpetual
Moving blog to itwerkzsometimes.com 2007-03-19 10:35:52 Creating this blog on its own server hasn’t been too difficult but there were some issues. The import process knocked out all of the comments on these posts for a start. Also Clustrmaps, which like the hit count sites, are all domain specific so if I want Clustrmaps on the new site then it will depressingly start blank, as will the hit counts sites.
All of the posts that have been on Digg, and are still being pointed to from Digg will need to stay on the old blog and will never point to the new blog version. Of course all new entries that I get Digg to look at will be pointed to the new version so from now on that will switch. Maybe all entries on the old blog that aren’t pointed at by Digg can be deleted. Trouble is there are others pointers to some of these old entries can be found from Google and lord knows where else.
Lastly how do I get anyone who subscribes, via RSS, to resubscribe to the new blog. I think I have replicated all of the subscribe links and even displ Read more:Moving
Three new acronyms a day 2007-03-21 14:44:01
This is the first in an occasional series of my interpretation of 3 acronyms
.
XHR: XMLHttpRequest, javascript and other scripting languages API to transfer XML data from a web server to a client using HTTP. An important part of AJAX. Without this Google maps would not have happened.
Reverse AJAX: Give me strength. For a start ‘Reverse’ isn’t an acronym. What this stuff does is, whereas AJAX goes to the server to get data to update the browser, with Reverse Ajax the communication is instigated from the server by pushing data to the client. Normal AJAX does a pull thing. So how does the server make communication with the browser. Not easily, as browsers only really listen for answers to questions they have asked. And of course there is the problem with firewalls. The first way is for the browser to poll often, like say every few seconds. The second way is for the server to load the data to the browser slowly, just to keep the channel open. Thirdly, there is the piggy Read more:Three
Wordpress documentation and podcasts 2007-03-21 09:39:35
I’ve been wading through the Wordpress
online documentation and there is a lot of it. I always prefer reading that stuff on paper so printed a whole load off which didn’t format too good but was readable. It’s going to take me a couple of weeks to understand this well but then I’ll be able to trash this blog with experience on my side.
Subscribed to some Wordpress and Web design podcasts and started listening to some of them this morning. And was I underwhelmed. One of the Wordpress podcasts was recorded by a kid of about 14 and was predictably full of ‘awesomes’. He was full of it for all sorts of plug-ins and bits of javascript and even he admitted some of them weren’t easy to get going. I can just imagine all sorts of fumbling around necessary to get these things working and a net result of dissapointment. What he thought was great was not quite what I would think of as great. Anyway he was enthusiastic and he’s done well to record t
Vista on a Core 2 Duo = waste of space 2007-03-27 14:38:36 Got a Core 2 Duo with Vista
on it and I hardly use it. I actually prefer using my XP machine which desperately needs XP reinstalling on it.
The idea was to migrate all my apps and data from the XP machine to the Vista machine then I could tidy up the XP machine i.e. apply the recovery DVD to it, let that thrash about to its hearts content and see what’s left when its done. The trouble with this thinking is that Vista just looks so naff and is so barely usable that I can hardly be bothered to use it at all. I have little confidence that anything I install on it will work. The new version of iTunes is still flaky and there is a chance that when syncing if you get your keystrokes in the wrong order you could end up with a trashed iPod. Great.
What else doesn’t work, hmm.. let’s see. Usenet newsgroup readers: Just checked whether Newsbin Pro is compatible with Vista and its not. What about good old Forte Agent newsreader, nope.There is one called Usenet Explorer which Read more:waste
Taking longer to test with QA Run than testing manually, eh 2007-03-30 16:54:53 We have a couple of guys here pounding the heart out of QA Run to regression test some applications. Till recently they were convinced they were doing system testing. Its taken them ages to get these scripts working but at last they do.
To manually regression test the application I have just been told takes 15 minutes which isn’t long and you would think if it can be manually regression tested so quickly then why bother spending lord knows how many weeks getting an automated test script to work. Dunno, doesn’t make much sense to me.
The automated test script also takes 2 hours to run. That’s 8 times longer than manually regression testing it. Daft. (I just hope no automatic test tool scripters read this nonsense coz they’ll hate it. Ed.)
Quote of the day
‘I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top’ an English Professor at Ohio University Read more:Taking
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