Category: Toys & Tech

WordPress: Configuration and Find & Replace

I’ve basically decided to break all hyperlinks from the past 7 years and am now publishing to the root of this site instead of the /blog directory. Screw it. It ain’t money to me, and everything going to /blog is getting redirected to / now. To be honest, I can’t be bothered with URL matching from my old MT blog to this new WP one. Like I said, screw it. Google can play catch up with their invincible green nanosecond cloud, and all the hotlinkers (some of them using my pics in their forum sigs for nearly seven years) can suck my /.

It was curious to see that there is no native Search and Replace tool in WordPress, but I found a couple plugins to do the job immediately:
Search and Replace (This one worked just fine for me.)
Search Regex Plugin (You can apparently use regular expressions with this one.)

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the complete absence of spam for the time being. It feels like 2003 again:

100% of my love...

Fuck Six Apart

Once upon a time there was a great hunk of code called Movable Type. It was a powerful tool for self-publishing on the web, unmatched in both flexibility and utility. It was the premiere blogging platform, for many good reasons – new users and developers were infected with joy spread by the more experienced. This was the golden age of MT, and its roots seemed to be spreading far and wide.

And then, tragedy.

After several key mistakes, Movable Type’s developers decided that hosted services were the wave of the future, and concentrated on feeding their new cash cows. Once king of the barnyard, MT was neglected for years, to the point where it really should have been taken out behind the barn and shot, but instead, its owners let it starve and waste away. Then they fired the keepers…

You know what? A parable is a horrible way to end a 7-year relationship. What I really mean to say is: FUCK YOU, SIX APART.

You made your vox, now go sleep with it.

Google Talk Plugin Crash – Windows 7 Home Premium

I bought an ASUS UL30A laptop when we were in the states to replace my trusty, crusty old Dell Latitude x300 that lasted for seven whole years and still wouldn’t quit. I decided on the X5 variant because it was black (as opposed to the silver option) and cheaper than the updated version, but still good for ten hours (actual; ASUS claims 12 hours but all of the reviews say 10+. Good enough.)
It’s my first extended experience with Windows 7, and with a x64 Win OS. It kicks ass very hard.
One of the few problems I’ve had with it was with Google Video Chat crashing Gmail when I’d try to pop out the chat window, only when using video. Clicking on the pop-out button would result in Chrome locking up but often still sending and receiving audio streams from the chat.
Popping-out the chat screen isn’t a necessary feature, so I tried to ignore it. Hitting that pop-out button is a twitchy habit, though, so I’d often inadvertently crash the browser and go through the force quit, no error report, hurry up and terminate please, restart browser, yes restore pages I had open before Google Chrome didn’t shut down correctly, reinitiate video chat and don’t pop out the window this time cycle.
Then today, I had a strange error a couple times just when starting Chrome: The following plug-in has crashed: Google Talk Plugin
This new error meant something had to be done, and this is what I’ve come up with:

  1. Close Google Chrome
  2. Uninstall the Google Talk Plugin via the appropriate Control Panel in Windows
  3. Reinstall from http://www.google.com/chat/video

I’m just guessing, but this procedure might work for other problems with the Google Talk plugin on other platforms as well; it seems this particular one springs up in Vista most often.

iBaby

I used to be an apple weenie, but then I decided to live in the third world, and as we all know, apple doesn’t care about poor people. So it’s been a revelation visiting home and using my sister’s iPhone for a week when she was on a cruise, and to a lesser extent, my mom’s MacBook to aggregate photos and video from several different sources.
The iPhone was pretty cool and three killer apps for me were Google Maps (although I tried the Android version on my cousin’s phone and it was even better), Gmail, and a Mafia Wars-type world war game that I got addicted to in a frighteningly crack-like way.
What really tickled me, though, was seeing an iPad for the first time. My cousin S got free tickets for Stars on Ice (which people still call Ice Capades) a few days ago and invited us to come. We took the babies and I had to check in our stroller at the Guest Link office at Staples Center before we could enter the stands. While I was getting my claim stub, a woman came in with her iPad, sobbing. She explained that the ushers were insisting that she had to check in her “baby” because she couldn’t have it in the stands. When I left, she was still trying to convince the clerk to make sure nothing happened to her baby and going so far as to wrap it in her cardigan.

A quick note about the Garmin nüvi 1450t

I bought one today for navigating around my home country… Took it home from Walmart and thought it was broken because it wouldn’t sync with the satellites. Eventually decided to look it up online and one Amazon reviewer said that it took quite a while to acquire a satellite signal upon first use – so I took it outside, restarted, and let it sit on a plastic table for a while. Almost ten minutes later, it was good to go.
It’s funny, though, if I hadn’t read this review on Amazon, I would have thought it was defective for sure.