Chris’ Blog

I am off to London, because Tomorrow… I am going to Google’s Developer Day. I am very excited about it, and look forward to meeting some of the people behind Google and getting to learn about some of their technology from them first hand. Exciting

I decided to convert my blog to use UTF-8 rather than Latin-1 as its character set, this turned out to be somewhat of a PITA. After changing all the table and database character sets manually I had to convert the data. Eventually settling for this little terminal magic.

mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1 --add-drop-table cs278_blog | sed 's/SET NAMES latin1/SET NAMES utf8/' | mysql cs278_blog

I redumped the data afterwards and checked it over with iconv which found nothing to complain about. I found how to do this here.

Wordpress 2.2 aka Getz has been released, once again I performed an upgrade using Subversion generated patches, which had one small problem. They changed the background images in the default style so I had to manually wget them from subversion.

cd wp-content/themes/default/images
wget http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2/wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickbg-{ltr,rtl}.jpg
rm kubrickbg.jpg

I came across this fabulous Internet speed testing tool called: Speedtest.net. Best I have seen, okay the flash use is a little over the top but it works well.

Adverts and other privacy intrusions are annoying fact of life on the World Wide Web, Firefox users have had a solution to this available for years in the form of Adblock and more recently Adblock Plus. Personally I use Adblock Plus because I like its inbuilt support for subscriptions to filter lists. I now have my own, small, filter list which sorts out some general annoyances I come accross whilst journeying with wilderness of the world wide web.

Subscribe to my filter list. (You need Adblock Plus installed for this to work)

Another release of Wordpress another potentially PITA upgrade to complete, but it isn’t thanks too patch. I quickly ran a diff of the Subversion repository like so:

$ svn diff http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.1.2 http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.1.3

Piped it to a file and applied it to Wordpress using patch, no drama no mess no effort. Just the way I like it

I have upgraded the version of Wordpres my blog runs, for me this is a pain in the ass due to custom modifications. So, this time I decided to use their subversion repository to create a patch and use that, guess what it worked first time.

To patch:

$ patch -i ./wordpress-2.1_2.1.2.diff -d /path/to/wordpress -p0

Dreamhosts DNS servers are being really slow, and unpredictable! So what I say!? I just moved away from them. Using this free service with along with this and this to serve all my DNS needs. For a total of separate DNS servers, I updated the whois records and all should be rotating around.

I used to have Firefox to use Google’s Browse by Name feature, but since I reinstalled my box I never got around to reconfiguring it. To do so yourself follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to about:config in Firefox.
2. Use the filter feature to find keyword.url.
3. Modify the preference and replace the default value with http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

Thanks to the Ubuntu Blog for this!

Anyway after configuring it I found a bug #84242, how cool is that bug number?

For ages sound emanating from flash player under Ubuntu has been difficult to achieve and a PITA regarding getting other sounds to player afterwards, I found a solution here.

# Flash also looks for /usr/lib/libesd.so.1
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1

# Flash expects /tmp/.esd/socket to exist.
sudo mkdir -p /tmp/.esd/
sudo touch /tmp/.esd/socket

Daniel Carrera