Jan
08
Domain Registry of America: Scam Warning
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Just a quick not to add to the many similar references online about this company. They’ve started mailing me (postal) about domains that are about to expire “in the next few months”, and how I could save money transferring to them. Some of the domains are also ones that expired years ago, but where I was the last domain holder.
They charge about 6 times the average rate of a 1 year .com domain registration, and from what I scan-read online, the Canadian courts have already warned them about deceptive marketing practices.
If you get any mail from them, ignore it. Maybe double-check your domain expiry dates to make sure they’re all up to date, but don’t deal with DRA.
Warning over.
Jan
08
The Fastest Development Language Might Not Be The One You Suspect
I’ve been working on some behind-the-scenes software for my Unique Blog Content service recently. There is one piece of the process that uses an iterative text-processing routine, which then dumps the output to a text file. (If you’re not a developer, that line might not mean much to you, but then this post won’t be of interest either, so I won’t explain what ‘iterative’ means).
I wrote the code in AutoIt, and it took about 20-25 minutes to do 1000 files. “Too slow”, I thought. So I re-wrote it in Visual Basic 6. It also took about 20 minutes, even when compiled into an executable, so top marks to the AutoIt team for matching Microsoft.
I then re-wrote it in PHP, as I wanted to add the ability to process nested regular expressions, which wasn’t made available until vb.net, which I don’t know how to program in.
PHP, running on my desktop (via phpDock) still, not on a souped-up server, took 2 minutes to do the same task (actually, a slightly more complicated one, because of the additional recursion within the regular expression).
Go figure…
Jan
08
Logmein Cookie Problem
Slightly off-topic this post. I’m writing it because something been bugging me about the free LogMeIn service to access your PC from other PCs. I go to log in to LogMeIn.com’s website at the remote PC, and I keep getting told that my browser is not accepting cookies. No idea why, as every other site works fine. In fact, even looking at the cookies, I can delete the one for LogMeIn.com, log in, and I see new cookies appearing. And LogMeIn support couldn’t help.
But I think I found a solution.
1. Open your browser and log in.
2. Open another browser window and go to the URL for your specific remote PC.
That’s it. For some reason that seems to work.
I’ve got the URL for #2 as a shortcut on my desktop, so it’s easy to open the browser at that URL.
Hope that helps the handful of people that are seeing the same problem without finding a solution.
Jan
08
Javascript In Posts Plugin Update
I’m finally hacking my way through the comments (spam and otherwise) that I’ve had backlogged on this site while I’ve been focusing on my other site, and have had some people say that the Javascript in Posts plugin doesn’t work on some versions of WP.
I’m going to be setting up installs of older versions of WP on a test site of mine, so I can test my software compatability, but if you have feedback on your version of WP and whether the plugin works OK or not, I would greatly appreciate it if you could drop me a line and let me know. Just add a comment to the plugin page.
Jan
08
Upgrading Wordpress - Blank Page
Just a hint for any fellow WordPress users around. I’ve just updated to the latest version (not through Cpanel - for some reason, Cpanel said I had to do a manual upgrade).
So, I FTPed all the files, logged into admin, and got the screen that tells me I need to upgrade. the next page presented the WP logo, but that was it. Nothing else.
To resolve this, I renamed my wp-content/plugins directory to wp-content/x-plugins , then created a new empty folder at wp-content/plugins
The upgrade worked then (although it generated several MySql errors basically saying it was trying to do some parts of the upgrade twice, but that’s not a real problem).
Now it’s just a case of re-instating the plugins one by one to see if any of them break either the visitor front end, or the admin screens….
