I am no longer on FaceBook and I do not want to receive any invites. I’ve been getting email spam from FaceBook reminding me to accept invitation to be friends – repeat emails for invite where I’ve already accepted those people as friends many months ago. I wonder if this is just happening to me? I’ve tried to unsibscrivbe usign the link in the emails (days after and the spam is still coming). The main FaceBook email preferences panel crashes when I try to save changes, and I should not need to be controlling this by setting preferences. Good riddance.
I have been putting off upgrading this blog from WordPress 2.1 but I wanted to play with the WordPress for iPhone application so had to bite the bullet and upgrade to get XML-RPC support that the iPhone application needed.
My blog hosts at DreamHost and I should have been able to use their nice “one click install” to upgrade my WordPress installation but I had moved directories and messed around with the WordPress install and had broken the ability to automatically upgrade. The DeamHost Web Panel One Click Account Backup made it easy to grab a pre-upgrade snapshot of everything including the MySQL database content. It packages all that as a tarball that I could download and save to a local system.
Anyhow since I used a modified theme and had played with other things I needed to do a full manual upgrade of WordPress so I followed the WordPress “extended” upgrade instructions. Once I logged into the WordPress Admin panel it let me know that it wanted to update the database and that ran fine.
So upgrading WordPress itself was painless however getting WordPress for iPhone running was not. When trying to set up the blog on the iPhone application I got the infamous “We could not find the XML-RPC service for your blog” error message.
Anyhow I looked around at what others have done and tried the following.
I checked in the WordPress Admin Settings>Writing panel and check that XML-RPC was enabled. But apparently this is not always enough and sometimes the box is checked but XML-RPC is disabled. So I disabled XML-RPC and then renenabled it. That did not solve the problem.
I found my solution here. I checked the header.php file in my current themes folder and made sure there was a correct <?php wp_head(); ?> tag–there was. Then following the rest of the instructions I used the WordPress Admin Appearance>Themes panel to set the current theme to something simple. I just chose the WordPress Default 1.5 theme. Then I configured my blog in the WordPress for iPhone application. Hurray! This time it worked. Then I went back to the Admin panel and changed the theme back to my custom theme.
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So I want to play more, and the Admin panel in WordPress 2.8 is much nicer than 2.1, but I am disappointed that the WordPress 2.8 still does not support custom words in the spelling dictionary. This is the most painful thing I find with WordPress. Oh and you would guess that the WordPress built in dictionary would know how to spell “WordPress”. Bzzzt WRONG!
I just upgraded the disk drive on my early 2008 MacBook Pro today to 0.5 TB 7200 rpm drive. Oh I remember my first disk drive was a 20 MB winchester on a DEC LSI-11/23. I also remember carrying around DEC RL-05 disks. I was running out of disk space on my MacBook Pro which had a 200 GB 7200 rpm Hitachi TravelStar drive. There was not enough space for things like large VMware Fusion virtual machines, terrain maps for Silent Wings, video clips, etc. A 5,400 rpm drive is a non-starter for performance reasons, so after some looking around the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420ASG looked like the only drive to go with. The -G in the part number means G protection, but Apple has it’s own protection as well in the Mac Book Pro. And it feels good that Apple is shipping the Momentus 7200.4 in the latest MacBooks. I brought mine at Buy.com.
I was thinking of buying an external disk tray to mount the drive in while copying data off the internal drive and but then read the reviews at Maximum CPU and MacInTouch for the Newer Technology Voyager Q hard drive dock and deviced to go that route. I brought mine from MacSales/Other World Computing. At around $95 it is more expensive than a simple external tray, but it is also much more useful in jockying disk drives between systems. I connected it to my MacBook Pro over Firewire 800 and it worked great, including booting off the Firewire 800 to test the disk worked fine.
A small Phillips screwdriver and Torx T6 driver was all else I needed. I found the video below that shows how to do the physical drive replacement. I’ve had my MacBook Pro apart before so no mystery there but this is a great video.
The whole backup of the 200 GB disk using Carbon Copy Cloner took about two and a half hours over Firewire 800 to the Voyager Q. Physically swapping the disk took about 15 minutes. Piece of cake.
I was looking at the Apple Macbook Pro updates announced at the recent 2009 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. The MacBook Pro reduction in I/O connectivity is getting depressing. The 15″ and 13″ models get an SD card slot but they do so at the expense of an ExpressCard/34 slot. It reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984 “your chocolate ration has been increased”.
At least the SD card slot does support most popular SD size media as Apple clarifies here.
The MacBooks Pros have too little I/O connectivity. Yes I know Firewire 800 is great, but I thought these were Macs for professionals, not PC laptops. Now the 13″ and 15″ models have a single FireWire 800 port and two USB 2.0 ports and an SD card slot and that is it. And yes I know you just can’t count ports to measure really usable I/O performance but the sheer physical connectivity alone of the older MacBook Pros was very useful. FireWire 800 is great but many high-end users need e-SATA based RAID connected via an ExpressCard e-SATA adapter or for various other wireless connectivity or other uses. The 17″ MacBook Pro has an ExpressCard slot and is a great laptop but it is also a bit too big for many users. Adding an SD card slot and keeping the ExpressCard/34 slot would have been great – or they could have even bundled an SD card reader if they needed the marketing claim for SD card support.
I live and die based on my one year old 2.5GHz 17″ MacBook Pro with 3 x USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 and an ExpressCard/32 slot. A great laptop. And it usually has a SanDisk Multi Card Reader in the ExpressCard/34 slot. That reads more types of media (if anybody cares about Sony MemoryStick Pro) than the SD card slot built into the new MacBook Pros and much more importantly when I remove it I have an ExpressCard slot for other uses.
I am curious if Apple implemented a really fast SD card slot or if it works via USB 2.0 (like the SanDisk ExpressCard/34 adapter I use). Still that would not make up for losing an ExpressCard/33 slot.
Oh well with the matte screen only available as an option on the MacBook Pro 17″ many photography and video professionals and serious amateurs will see that as the only portable computer from Apple they can use. I thought at some time a matte screen for the 15″ MacBook Pro would appear. I take that as more consumer apathy or ignorance about color and color management than Apple making bad decisions.
Schemp-Hirth is developing the new Arcus, a 20m flapped two seat glider based on the Duo Discus. I love the Duo Discus and the Arcus looks very interesting. Schemp-Hirth say the airfoil for the Arcus is developed by Dr. Werner Würz and others contributed to the modified planform and winglets. There is some of the kind of pointless “Is it a flapped Duo Discus? Is is not?” discussion on r.a.s. Well it’s a 20m flapped double seater based on the Duo Discus XL with tweaked/modified airfoils and planform etc. Like nobody is going to just be crazy enough to take the exiting Duo and just cut flaps into the airfoil. It’s going to be changed and the aerodynamics updated. Is a “flapped Duo Discus”? You bet, and that would be pretty good marketing to leverage off all us Duo Discus lovers.
Anyhow I pasted Schemp-Hirth’s artists renderings for the Arcus and Duo Discus XL over each other and you can see the large version PDF if you click on the image above. This of course depends on the accuracy of the artist renderings Schemp-Hirth uses in marketing materials.
This is some very obvious Monday morning quarterbacking. But I am extremely negative about Sun Microsystems. I think Sun’s board is crazy for not taking the IBM $7B acquisition offer. Maybe they think they can pull something better off, but it is hard to think who that suitor could be and why they’d value Sun at more than $7B. Sun has been churning though money and has been undergoing endless changes for ages. And while there have been occasional better days; the slumping economy must be hammering them and overall they are on a downward spiral to irrelevance. A sad outcome for this once strong Silicon Valley company. And now that an acquisition has been so publically aired that’s got to further hurt potential customer willingness to buy into Sun’s future.
The shit storm that Sun is about to be dealt from stockholders and their lawyers is going to be interesting to watch.
I repeated this talk with slightly updated slides, at a Bay Area Soaring Associates (BASA) meeting on March 26th. Here are the PDF slides from the BASA talk
Since I was playing earlier SeeYou Mobile simulator and also with the new SeeYou Mobile release candidate running on a real iPAQ 310 I decided to make an iPAQ 310 skin for the simulator. The simulator is currently the older SeeYou Mobile 3.0 release and not the version designed for PNAs, Naviter confirmed they will be updating the simulator to pick up all those UI changes later, for now it is quite usable however and the large 800×480 screen works very nicely.
The skin is based on a photograph of my iPAQ 310 with some Photoshop cleanup work. There are up, down and enter buttons added on the top right hand edge that do the same as the iPAQ scroll wheel, and the power button will turn the simulator off.
I was hoping that the SeeYou Simulator might support transparency/alpha to allow a nice rounded shape but (after wasting time trying) I checked with Naviter who confirmed it does not.
After suggesting to other pilots on the ASH-26E owners forum that the Naviter SeeYou Mobile Simulator is not that useful I actually started to play with it more than I had done before and I have changed my opinion, it is pretty nice to play with and handy for testing out stuff. I’ve also hacked the simulator to run in a custom skin with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, shown in the screen shot above (click on the image to see it full size). Below I’ll provide the files to do this.
[Note: I've updated this with a skin with the additional iPAQ PDA buttons for Calendar, Contacts, Mail and iTask. However I am still having problems understanding the simulator behavior with these buttons. See notes below.] (more…)
