News from Great Castle Wilson

  • What do you mean mysql can’t find my wp database?

    Well, that was more excitement than I was expecting.

    Tonight, Deb wandered into my downstairs office and said, “Are you playing with the server? I can’t get to my blog”. I naturally assumed it was the normal problem of my dynamic dns address changing and the associated delay before mikew.ca catches up. So I tried connecting to my blog and what did I see: “WordPress can’t find your database”. What!!! That would be bad; very very bad.

    Well, after about an hour of messing around, I realized it wasn’t quite that bad. MySQL and all my data really were still there, but it turns out they had been masked by some misguided hacking I had been doing with MacPorts.

    Whew!

    Well, in honour of the near miss, I promptly did a full backup of my entire website (as apposed to the incremental nightlies) and the mysql database, and then upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

    So far, everything looks good. The upgrade went painlessly, as it has for me since I started using WP. Man, I wish all software was that easy to deal with.

  • EclipseCON

    It’s Wednesday night, and I’m getting ready to head out to the e4 kickoff BOF. We did our Eclipse 4.0 talk this morning and it seemed to go pretty well — big crowd, no rotten fruit thrown. It will be interesting to see who shows up for the BOF tonight.

    I’m rapidly approaching my limit for being away from home. The weather is nice here, and there are lots of smart people to talk to, but I really need to be back in my own environment. Oh well, at least I can say the weather’s good. Here’s a shot from outside the hotel:

  • I’m traveling next week.

    Next week is EclipseCon 2008, and this year I’m going. Those of you who know me, understand how big a deal that is. I really don’t like to travel; I feel about travel pretty much the way most people feel about getting a limb amputated.

    Despite that, if the prelude was any indication, I expect it will be a very exciting conference this year. I’m looking forward to talking f2f with many of the people who are active in the community that I know only from mailing lists and bugzilla.

    I fly out Sunday, and will be back in the city on Friday. Wish me luck. 🙂

  • GUI Bloopers: Paste Special

    So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, it offers the user a dialog with a range of available formats, something like this:

    The typical behavior, in this case, is to open the dialog with the format that would have been chosen if the user had simply picked “Paste” already selected. I guess this is done so that, if the user hits return when the dialog opens, they will get the same behavior as Paste provides. The thing is though, no one who opens that dialog ever wants that behavior. The only reason why a user would go through the extra pain of the dialog is because they want to paste in some way that is not the default, so in point of fact, picking any other choice would be better than picking the one that does what Paste would do.

    The question is then, what should the dialog have as the default selection?

    In 99.9% of the times Paste Special is used, the intent is to remove any rich formatting from the content in the paste buffer, so that it can pick up the surrounding formatting of its destination. Given that, when there are multiple possible formats, always pick the “plainest” one. So, for example, in the above dialog, it should have “Unformatted text” selected by default.

    Of course, as usual, the Apple guys have understood the underlying problem better. Instead of a Paste Special command, in Pages I get this…

    … which does what you (almost always) actually want, without putting up a dialog at all.

  • CBC Radio’s WireTap

    I am an avid CBC Radio 1 listener, and as such, I have heard pieces of the CBC program “WireTap” somewhere around twenty times now. In all those times, the longest I have ever been able to convince myself to listen to the show was about five minutes.

    I honestly can’t imagine how such blecherous dreck ever got the green light, let alone how it can continue to be aired. It is essentially a half-hour of incoherent, neurotic rambling, of the sort that you would barely put up with if it was being generated by someone you cared about. In this case, the host is one of the singularly most unlikeable on-air personalities since Kenny versus Spenny, so the only possible reaction is to leap for the channel change dial.

    Please, CBC, kill this show. It single-handedly lowers the quality of your entire station to the level of “crappy audio-blog”.

  • Sometimes it’s the little things

    It’s been a while since I’ve done a link-of-the-day, but this one made me think. (Specifically, “Are my UI designs getting this right?”):

    Thanks, Windows. If I had a cookie, I’d give it to you.

    Well… That’s disappointing. Not only is the original post gone now, but it’s been so long that I can’t even remember what they were on about. Oh well.

  • Happy Birthday Randy and Tim

    The snowstorm on Friday provided an excellent addition birthday present for Randy and Tim as they spent the day, yesterday, at Pakenham ‘boarding in the nicest powder we’ve had all season. Dennis, Katie and I were able to receive this benefit as well. 😉

    The extended family and friends got together that evening to celebrate the birthdays, and a good time was had by all.

    Presents!

  • Camile’s new home

    Ken asked me to post some pictures of Camile’s new home in Lord of the Rings Online. Here they are:

    Outdoor shot with falls in the background

    Camile practicing her lute by the fire

    The house is very small inside — small enough that I had to decide between having a table or a bed — but it’s home.

  • I read books.

    Steve Jobs can be such an a**hole sometimes.

    According to Gizmodo, he said about the Amazon Kindle:

    “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

    Hey, Steve, ever think that your iPods are part of the reason why fewer people are reading? People used to read books on the bus, now they just listen. Why not show some societal responsibility and bring some of that trademark Apple coolness to something that drives intellectual development, so your next generation of customers will be able to get jobs that let them afford to buy iPods.

  • Some more OLPC XO notes

    Here are a few random notes about the XO, after a day of playing with it:

    • It’s heavier than I thought it was going to be. If I had to guess, I would say that combining the need to be robust enough for kids, with the need to be inexpensive, probably means that it was bound to be heavy. It would really be too heavy to be an eBook reader, if I wasn’t pudgy enough to have a “belly shelf” to put it on. 😉
       
    • The keyboard is too small to type on. It is, of course, too small for my adult hands, but it even seemed small when my 11 year-old nephew was playing with it. I understand that the size (and the lime-green color) were intended to make it less appealing to adult thieves. I guess will see. To me it’s no worse than learning the Treo or the iPod Touch keyboards. In this case, 2 fingers from each hand + the right thumb on the space bar is working for me.
       
    • There’s something odd about the trackpad. It seems to get in a mode where it causes the cursor to jump to one corner of the screen every time you lift your finger off the surface. Whatever it is, Jeff noticed the problem on his as well, so it’s not a hardware problem with mine.
       
    • FBReader works better than I thought it would. I installed it by finding an RPM that started with “fbreader” at http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/ and then getting it with a command like:

      rpm -ivh http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/fbreader...

      (Note: You probably have to be su’ed to do that.)

      To start it, you type “FBReader” at the shell prompt. To exit, you hit “ctrl-Q”. The default font, font sizes, margin spacing, and keybindings all need to be adjusted on first use, but the values are remembered so it’s not a big deal. It may just be personal taste, but I find the resulting experience to be more pleasing than using the built in PDF reader. In any case, it’s certainly faster.
       

    • The SD slot seems to work fine. The way I tested FBReader was by sticking in an old 256Meg SD card I had used with one of my previous Palms, which was full of eBooks. It mounted as “/media/SD256” (because the volume label was “SD256”), and when I told FBReader that “/media/SD256/palm/Books” was on the library path it found the 4 unencrypted DOC format books that were there.
       
    • Wireless is definitely an issue. After several hours of attempting to get it to connect via WEP to my Airport Extreme, including following the instructions of people who have gotten it to work, I have given up. The claim is that the XO can’t speak WPA yet, but there also seems to be a counter-example — broken links removed. I may switch over to WPA and try that, but for now I just stuck a Linksys “USB200M ver.2” USB-to-wired-ethernet adapter into one of the USB ports. This worked without problem, and at least seems to be faster than using wireless anyway.