MacBook Pro
Yay!
I recently ordered a MacBook Pro so that I could have a better development machine and could actually test Universal applications.
It came today! The packaging was immaculate. I’m not done installing everything I need on it. But, so far, it works great. It’s especially fast at compiling which should save me lots of time.
The only problem has been .Mac syncing … and that’s because the servers seem to be down. :(
New Hosting
Got my website transferred to Site5 and it all seems to be working okay. I just need to make my buddy Nick transfer his website and then my poor iMac will be free from the drudgery of HTTP requests.
Telus: Bluetooth == Piracy
I just had a warped experience with a Telus rep while cancelling my old phone.
Basically, to set this up, I decided that I wanted a new phone with specifically these features:
- Reasonably cheap monthly plan
- Good looking (as far as phones can be)
- Thin
- Bluetooth enabled (non-crippled)
- iSync capable
The last two go in hand. Needless to say, I couldn’t find anything like that with Telus but Fido had a RAZRv3 phone which pretty much fulfilled all those requirements. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and been pretty satisfied. I can send pictures to and from the phone using Bluetooth and sync all my calendars and contacts. Yay!
Today, as I called to cancel my old Telus phone, the rep asked me for my reason and I gladly volunteered my Bluetooth requirements (so that perhaps they would see the light). His response to me was almost instantaneous: “Oh, so you want to pirate software!” I kid you not!!
I was shocked! What a weird thing to say. I proceeded to explain that there is no reason for me to pirate software onto the phone. Where would I get it? Why would I want it to have additional software? At this point, he made another statement which made me cringe. (I’m paraphrasing this one) “So you want to pirate MP3s?” … Again, shock! How would I pirate MP3s with a phone? Cause the bandwidth is so fast? I again proceeded to explain to him that IF I wanted to put MP3s onto the phone that I had ripped from CDs, that is my right. Nothing illegal about it. But why would I even do that? I have an iPod for music. Duh!
Seriously, these aren’t event credible uses of Bluetooth! I don’t understand these people. They’re fighting wind mills! I just can’t believe that a company would educate their reps this way.
Obviously I made the right decision to leave them. Not a moment too soon!
Wordpress Weirdness
I just checked my site and Wordpress wasn’t working. I was getting an “error establishing database connection”.
It’s really weird because my wp-config.php file hadn’t changed. The only thing that did is that I updated to OSX 10.4.4 and something is making Wordpress unable to connect or resolve “localhost”. I got around it by actually typing out the IP in wp-config.php (127.0.0.1). Lame!
Hopefully I’m not the only one to exerience it. I’ll have to investigate it tomorrow morning tho, cause it’s late :(
Anyway, sorry if the site was down :)
Update: This is a known problem. The Wordpress forum has a page about it.
Wordpress hack to make Flickr post drafts
I’m a Flickrite and I started using it to host pictures that I put up on my blog entries.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to have Flickr post the entries to my website as “Draft”. So I had to cook up a little hack for my xmlrpc.php file. Here it is in case you’re looking to do something similar with your Wordpress installation:
// … lines omitted, find this part:
$post_author = $user_data->ID;
$post_title = $content_struct['title'];
$post_content = apply_filters( ‘content_save_pre’, $content_struct['description'] );
$post_status = $publish ? ‘publish’ : ‘draft’;
// Add the hack for Flickr here
if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘Flickr’) >= 0) {
$post_status = ‘draft’;
}