WordPress automatic upgrade fails – solution
If faced with a non-starter upgrade process when trying to auto-update to the latest version of WordPress (from 2.7 to 2.7.1 for instance), make sure your server can handle PHP5. Adding the following line to .htaccess file on your root (between the # BEGIN WordPress and #END WordPress lines) will ensure the upgrade succeeds.
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
New look…
Presenting the newly reconstructed Tim Sodhi’s Weblog! Featuring mods of a numerous themes available, as well as some of my own hacks thrown in, this is the new face of my blog. Welcome one and all.
It has been forever since I updated the look and feel of my blog. Truth is, the previous theme I created seemed to fit my needs just fine. I couldn’t really find another that would match its simplicity and style. That, along with the inherent ennui that tends to take over once one is settled into a fine groove, made updates to the theme seem like too much work. But all one needs is a bit of patience and time, and here we are.
I particularly like the new simplistic style, clean lines, layout as well as the color scheme for this theme. So ladies and gentlemen, say Hello to the new look! Cheers.
Coda SVN support with Versions
For the unlucky few who don’t have SVN (Subversion) repositories set up for them: hosting one’s own SVN repositories might be the only solution. While Leopard ships with Apache2 and SVN support, enabling and configuring the same is tedious. This site walks through the entire process.
For my needs though, I chose Versions, a commerical SVN frontend that makes setting up multiple SVN repositories easy and quite straightforward. In my case, I set up a local repository, pointing the location to a folder on my RAID drive. And that was it!
Editors on a Mac are always a hotly contested issue on which no two programmers usually see eye-to-eye. Some prefer the simple elegance of vi, while others prefer the bells and whistles offered by editors like Coda, while some still would prefer the Eclipse route for nearly all their programming needs (lord knows why – the namesake will confirm). I fall in the bells and whistles category, and have alternated between Textmate and Coda – both prime editors. Textmate is clearly more powerful of the two, however setting up an SVN repository on the same is more a hassle, than on Coda.
Panic’s Coda is a beautiful, and powerfuleditor, and like Panic’s other products – Transmit and Unison, very OSX in it’s look and feel. What’s more – it features SVN support right off the bat. To this end, one needs to set up a New Site within Coda (it doesn’t work otherwise, trust me). Fill in at least one destination, I suggest Local URL (a dummy location like http://localhost/) and the local root (where the files will be stored). Click Checkout Source and point it to the location of the folder where the SVN repository was created with Versions app, and Bob’s your uncle.
A note though – for some reason, committing/update/modification may not work the first time the site is created and the working window brought up. To make it work just restart the app.
MacBook Pro Pr0n
As promised here are the much anticipated porn pics – of the MacBook Pro kinds.
The tease, strutting its stuff.
Oh la la la!
Naughty naughty!
Does Stevie know?
The Money shot!
Am partial to the tops anyways.
And that concludes this presentation. Time to bring your pulses down a bit… stay tuned for more…
iLife ’09 and Face Detection in iPhoto
I have been asked numerous times in the last few weeks how I feel about the new iLife 2009 suite, and I have been noncommittal at best due to lack of time to actually work with the apps. No more, I say. The last few days I have delved deep into the app usage, and I am quite impressed. Though the changes are not monumental in terms of features etc, they are a real step forward – iPhoto and iWeb in particular.
The buzz on iPhoto has been around its new Face Detection and Locations features. iPhoto goes through a composite of one’s pictures and identifies faces based on a learning algorithm, helped along by error correction initiated by the user. To kick this feature off, one needs to identify a specific face in any picture. iPhoto will then go on to classify the unique characteristics it finds in the face one identified, to collect images in the library it computes are the same person.
Sounds really impressive on paper, so I decided to take it for a whirl. The results were a mixed bag. When identified properly, i.e. a full face-on shot of say a person X, it will correctly locate pictures of X. However, if person X is wearing sunglasses or other accessories, iPhoto will err repeatedly, as can be seen in the screen-shot below. I identified a former colleague of mine, Marco, in a picture, and iPhoto went off on a tangent, erroraneously concluding all who wore sunglasses were Marco.
On the flip side, I identified a picture of my little niece in a clear shot, and iPhoto was able to correctly identify her from the time she was a few months old. She’s 2.5 now. Very impressive.
Locations works just as well. One does need to have a GPS capable camera (an iPhone for instance), or a GPS device, that can embed Geo codes in the EXIF data of the photo, for iPhoto to automatically determine the location of the picture. Or one can choose to specify the location manually – a tedious task when one has 10,000+ photos (from 2008 alone like I do).
More on iWeb next time.
