Well that was a ride. Spent all day trying to do an upgrade from Wordpress 2.5.0 to 2.6, only to run into the “White Screen of Death” over, and over again. I couldn’t get into anything - the blog index, the admin panel, nothing. As it turned out, there was two different issues to be dealt with.
First, as pointed out by Colin McNulty in amazing detail over at his blog (http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2008/07/08/solution-to-wordpress-blank-screen-of-death/), the automated Wordpress upgrade.php script appears to add an extra line in the wp-config.php file. A single extra blank line causes most of these problems. Remove this line manually, and you can once again access your admin panel, where you’ll be able to fix the second problem, if you still can’t read the index of your blog. It may just be stupid of me, but I forgot to backup my theme folder when I upgraded - WordPress was still trying to use the theme I had on there prior to the upgrade, which was missing. So simply go to the Admin Panel, and revert back to the default wordpress theme. Or, I guess, you could just re-upload the old theme if you managed to back that up and all.
Dear MSI,
Why can’t you ship the damned thing? Why? We understand that there is a shortage of super duper 6-cell batteries that are delaying the high end model, but some of us will settle for the 3-cell versions. I don’t need an undistrial strength battery in mine anyways. But what in the world is delaying the 3-cell? You taunt us with this beautiful two pound, three ounce netbook, with all of it’s awesome OS X capabilities. You put up “Buy Now!” links, only to take them down two and a half minutes later. But you never, ever, ship them. Why? Why can’t you give me my wind?
Love,
Brian
It’s that time of the year again… the time of the year when production on the next version of Windows, this time around being Windows “7″, is going ahead at full throttle… the time of the year when Microsoft begins to open up its “generous” arms and lets information about the next generation of computing, the thing that’ll change your lives and your children’s lives, lose. So far they seem to really like multi-touch. We can understand that. The iPhone is snazzy.
But somewhere in the darkest corners of the internets, the first M1 build of Windows “7″, Build 6519, was leaked on June 11th. It’s been wabbling around for a while, with many taunting videos and screenshots making the rounds, but now we have it, the full thing, untouched ISO and all. Exciting? Kind of. Just picture Windows Vista SP1, and then kill off some stability, like the ability to install video drivers (seriously - a bug in 6519 crashes the system when you try to install any 3rd party video driver), add some sprinkles, and you’ve got yourself 6519.
Now, where’s 6574?
You know, as I so wonderfully put it the other day in describing it to someone - each year has three major holidays. First MacWorld in January, then WWDC in June, and finally Christmas in December. During the first two of these holidays, Steve Jobs steps onstage and bestows upon us a brand new goody or two for us to salivate over.
Today was that day. Today, at WWDC ‘08, Steve Jobs announced and demonstrated for the first time the iPhone 3G (shocker! surprise! amazing!), which absolutely no one knew was coming. No one. The basic things which we all kind of expected - an all black or white plastic back, 3G, and GPS capabilities.
Also, which to me is more interesting (as much as I like gadgets and gizmos like the iPhone, my main interest lies in computers), is the announcement of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. What we’ve got here, coming sometime in 2009, is an optimized Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with some snazzy fixes and a couple of core improvements. It sounds to me like this is a bigger deal than Apple’s letting lose - I’ve noticed that along with each version of Mac OS X, there’s been a slight decrease in stability. More force quits, more crashes, things of that nature. What they want to do with Mac OS X 10.6 sounds exactly spot on. This is something to watch.
Wow. For some reason, updating this blog seems a lot less easy after I’ve kindled my love affair with Twitter. Who would have known that 140 characters would be so addictive?
The other day, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 x86 final on my desktop PC (a Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 7600 256MB) finally making it a tri-boot system between Windows Vista Ultimate, Mac OS X 10.5.1 (yeah, you read that right), and Ubuntu 8.04. Many of you are probably well aware of my stance with Linux, which I still believe is largely justified. I’m not quite sure why I’ve given it another chance. I guess it’s because it’s been such a while since I’ve tried it out, or maybe I just felt the impulse to be just a little bit geeky? What I’ve found isn’t surprising - it’s still extraordinarily confusing, relies largely or almost completely on buggy community driven applications (which just don’t work as well as more established ones), and frankely isn’t enjoyable to use. I feel like if you need to say “well, here goes half of my day” when you’re preparing to install an application, something just isn’t right. I spent about three hours figuring out how to setup my dual monitors, how to get Adobe AIR installed (which I’ll say more about in a bit), finding substantial applications for daily, average things, updating Firefox 3.0 to the latest RC1 version, and installing Adobe Flash. Fun.
The shining star in this whole process is Adobe AIR - a runtime that I never quite took seriously or as necessary before today. It works. And it works well. While looking for some application alternatives on Linux (specifically a working Twitter client), I found that it’s more than easy to install Adobe AIR applications, which is seriously a breath of fresh air, and that they, well… just work. I’ll definitely be looking more into AIR in the future, and I advise anybody, especially people new to Linux, to give it a try. It’s currently in beta form for Linux and can be found at http://labs.adobe.com, although your ability to actually get it installed may vary.
Back on the home front a bit, I’ve continued my slow, slow work on Servo-Macs 4B. It’s going along fine, and I aim on having it done before the end of August. Progress will most definitely speed up once June begins, and I’m out of school.
I have a confession to make - a short year ago even, I despised the thought of social networking sites. I think the reason for this is clear… MySpace. Though now, just one year later, we have social networking sites that actually deliver some sort of quality. Facebook, Pownce, and my favorite Twitter are just some of the newer, fancier, classier sites that I’ve recently become interesting in. So on the side I’ve added a group of links called “Social Networking” that lists all the social networking sites I’m registered on. Make sure you add me on Twitter especially - it’s freakin’ addictive.
Hey everyone. Just small things for now. To everyone out there who’s ever asked me for my Wii Friend Codes in my Nintendo Wii games, I’ve just created a page with an easy to update list for me to update every time I get a new game, just to streamline things and make them a little easier for everyone. You can check it out on the sidebar to the right on this post.
Also, I’m not sure if anyone’s checked out Twitter, but I’ve just got into it and it’s pretty cool. Make sure you sign up and add me at http://twitter.com/derfbwh if you have one yourself!
So I’m not sure if any of you have ever seen or heard of this, but check out this Wikipedia biography page of Li Ching-Yuen, who if he and the Chinese government are to believed, lived to the amazing age of 256. He claimed to have lived mainly off of steamed vegitables and light fruits, as well as rice. He also attributed his longevity to the apparently incredibly bad-ass Gotu Kola plant, which was studied after his death. The study wielded surprising results - the plant actually DID, whether by amazing coincidence or chance - contain a special “youth vitamin-X” only found in the Gotu Kola, which “exerts a rejuvenating influence upon the ductless glands, the healthy functioning of which is, the means by which the brain and body are maintained for healthy activity.” Of course records in China have always been shakey, and it’s entirely unlikely that this age is true, it is food for the mind and I find it really interesting to look into.
Also, go see Iron Man. It’s one of the best movies I can remember seeing, certainly as good or better than Spider-Man 2, and would be named my favorite movie of the last couple of years if not for Cloverfield. It’s that good.
So I’ve been hearing a lot lately about this new game called “Grand Theft Auto IV” that came out last night, which happened to cause all sorts of mayhem and has been praised as the second coming of Jesus and how EA, Bungie, Neversoft, and the gang may as well close up shop now, because it’s not going to get any better than that.
So I’m contemplating on whether or not it’s really worth the purchase - I’ve bought quite a fair bit of games lately, particularly Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Brothers Brawl, both of which are more than enough to occupy my gaming time (along with my newly found love of Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition.. hey, I’m late to the show) for the time being. Besides, I have Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City. I’ve heard the game play is actually a small step backwards of that in those games, which seems like a disappointment, because I wasn’t particularly thrilled about their gameplay much as it was.
