Category Archives: code

WordPress 2.5

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 everything went smoothly, plugins updated semi automatically, i just had to click some buttons.

i just have to get used to the new admin area now…

Getting Carbonite to Backup USB Drives

I use  Carbonite Online Backup for backup, one problem is that they don’t support backing up external USB drives.

However I’ve found that if you mount your USB drives in windows as NTFS folders then you can navigate to the drive, then select and back up the folders on the drive as if they where on the C: drive.

Instructions on how to mount the drives can be found here:

How to create and use NTFS mounted drives in Windows XP and in Windows Server 2003″
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307889

The Amazon Kindle

The Kindle looked nice in their video but i doubt i’d buy it, well unless they have lonely planet signed up.

Plus it’s B&W and we’re used to cheap colour printing, most glossy magazines will not work in B&W. Apparently you have to convert doc and pdf files and you can only do that by emailing it for $0.10. i

On the whole it’s too expensive and it’s probably USA only at the moment, so I’ll pass.

Quality JavaScript from Scratch

???¢?¢?€š?¬?…?€?If you’ve avoided JavaScript, or only knew it in its previous ???¢?¢?€š?¬?…?€?toy language???¢?¢?€š?¬?‚?? incarnations, now’s the time to step up and get to know the newer, smarter JavaScript. This hands-on tour will get you started with JavaScript before illuminating the ways in which the DOM can be utilised via JavaScript, the practicalities of pop-up windows, and how JavaScript can work within a web page to produce slick DHTML effects.???¢?¢?€š?¬?‚??

Link: http://www.sitepoint.com

Firefox beta 2 and images

A post i made in reply to a forum post on dpreview.com

Does anyone else have difficulty seeing images embedded in posts (Image Control tool) while browsing dpreview.com with Firefox (I’m using v1.5 beta 2)? Since switching to Firefox from IE, I’ve lost this ability. I see only the links to control the image, but not the image itself. Perhaps it’s extension or security-setting related?

well it seems to work for me with FF v1.5 beta 2, if you check in the options, go to content, and and check load images is checked and from originating site is not checked, you can probably add an exception for dpreview if you like the setting as it is. (I can’t get an exception to work) image of the option screen follows (for testing) ff options BTW FF v1.5 beta 2 is the beta of FF 1.5, as new as it gets would be the nightly builds, why use it, firefox is free, the developers need feedback so they can fix things, crash data is reported to the dev team and used to fix problems. if people don’t test then it wont get built or be stable. BTW FF crashed whilst writing this post, session saver brought the page back and the unfinished post, cool.

Picasa Web Export

The web templates that come with picasa are not valid html (lots of Internet Explorer specific mark-up). they also will not run/display .mov QuickTime Movies which many cameras produce in the web page. After doing some research on how to edit the templates and get them to appear as new/extra options in the web export window, i now have a clean xhtml export option. I used this for the Women of WW2 Memorial gallery, with a little post editing to add my header. If you like to have a look at the template or use it yourself then you can download it here.

Download: Picasa xhtml template.zip

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales License.

email posting test

Well I’m now up and running on wordpress, and have set up the modified wp-mail.php email posting hack (http://blade.lansmash.com/?p=156#comments and http://www.economysizegeek.com/?cat=13), so I have every thing blogger gave me but faster. I even got all the old posts transferred over without much hassle. The only fixes I’d like with wp-mail.php are with the conversion of URLs to links and emailing images but these should be fixable faster then waiting on blogger to sort things out, so it looks like it may be bye bye to Hello (http://www.hello.com) as I can post with greater flexibility by email.