Month: May 2008

My Stuff

A lot of people come to this site searching for help on specific issues with or opinions/info a specific gadget or technology.  For that reason, I thought I’d state publicly the gadgets and technologies I use (embarrassing though that may prove).

  • Wireless Media Streamer Buffalo LinkTheater
    Streams video (most divx/xvid and wmv9) and/or music to my TV from a DLNA compliant server like the Linkstation Live or Windows Media Player’s built-in media sharing service.
  • 500GB Home NAS Buffalo LinkStation Live (HS-DH500GL)
    Can store video and music files and stream them over a wireless network to a DLNA certified media streaming device like my LinkTheater.
  • Mobile Phone – Nokia N73 smartphone
    5 megapixel camera, Symbian/Series 60 OS, currently on Orange Pay As You Go
  • Nintendo Wii
  • PlayStation 2 (Slimline)
  • Wireless ADSL Modem/Router – Netgear DG834G
    Old version 1; basic but functional.
  • Laptop PC – Acer Aspire 5003 wlmi dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu
  • Desktop PC
    My main computer is one I built up myself and upgraded over the years, specced as follows:

So, if you’ve any questions on any of the above, please let me know. Oh and I also have broadband with Plus.net (who are excellent) where £15 a month gets me 8Mbps and 15GB usage (unlimited from midnight to 8am) and I have web hosting with WebHostingBuzz.com where I have a reseller account for just $5 a month.

Copy and Paste on N73

I’ve had this phone for over a year now and have, to my shame, only just figured out how to copy and paste.  I had an inkling it could do it because there’s an option in your call log to “Use Number” where one of the sub-menu options is “Copy”; which just made it more frustrating that I couldn’t figure out how to paste!!

Anyway, it turns out to be an amazingly simple mechanism using the edit key (the one on the bottom left with the pencil icon on it – I knew it had to have some purpose!!). Thanks to some person called Walker for his generic guide to Symbian Series 60 functionality.

Copy: To copy text to the clipboard, hold the pencil/edit key until Copy appears on the screen above the right soft-key and scroll using the joystick to select the text. When you’ve selected the text to copy, just hit Copy.

Paste: To paste text from the clipboard, move the cursor to where you want to paste and hold the pencil key until Paste appears on the screen by your right soft key. When it appears and then press the right soft key to paste.

Solved: New WAMP Install Won’t Parse PHP

I spent ages trying to figure out why my new installation of WAMP Server 2 wouldn’t parse my PHP and was spitting it out exactly as-is in the source file. I hoked around in the VirtualHost configuration, because the PHPMyAdmin that comes with WAMP Server was working fine so it had to be something wrong in the VirtualHost that I just configured that was stopping .php files being sent to the PHP parser, yes? No.

As it turns out, it’s much simpler than that. Apache was sending the file to PHP to be parsed, but PHP was ignoring my code. Why? WAMP Server 2 comes with “short open tags” turned off (this may be a general PHP or PHP 5 thing, though not sure). Click WAMP -> PHP -> php.ini to edit the aforementioned file and find the line:

short_open_tag = Off

Replace Off with On et voila.

The ‘more correct’ though long-winded solution is to replace all your <? opening tags with <?php if you’re really keen (though that’ll also mean replacing <?= with <? echo). Me, I think I like my short tags.

WordPress / Fantastico Server Move

I recently moved this site to a new host because of ongoing problems with my previous hosts. Thanks to some intermittent database errors I’d decided it would be prudent to do my first backup in some time at the start of last week. By the end of that week they’d deleted my account, so I suppose I should be grateful their database server was so f**ked. Nevertheless, the move caused a few issues when my new hosts told me the complete backup I uploaded to them was corrupt. I can only assume (because some backups were corrupt and others weren’t) that it was due either to encrypting the archives using AES in Winzip or decrypting them in 7zip.

Anyway, that meant manually creating the accounts, setting up the mail accounts and subdomains in them, extracting the root folders (public_html, mail etc) individually and manually importing the SQL backup. Everything was relatively painless (if dull) however Fantastico wouldn’t recognise my WordPress installations (I had two). To persuade Fantastico that there really were a couple of WordPress blogs I had to do two things:

  1. Extract the \.fantasticodata\WordPress files from the zip (in this case it was called nerd.steveferson.com| ) and upload it to the same location in the FTP server. Of course that bar | made Windows barf, so you’d need to rename it (e.g. using an underscore instead) and replace the bar after uploading it via the FTP client (FileZilla didn’t seem to have a problem doing this).
  2. I think this is might be because the blog’s in the root of a subdomain, but I also had to upload a file called installed_in_root.php from \.fantasticodata to that location on the server.

Once I did this, Fantastico picked up the blog and allowed me to upgrade WordPress to 2.5.1 – no hassle.