Dave Coveney’s Geek Out

As anyone who knows me can confirm, I’m always interested in the latest tech and software. So at the WordCamp UK at the weekend I was interested to learn about a new iPhone client for WordPress. And this is the result.. I’m blogging by phone.

Ok, so it’s not perfect…formatting is limited and the picture ends up browser sized rather than using a correctly sized thumbnail. But it’ll have it’s uses..both in journalism sites and for keen personal bloggers.

I’m also having a fiddle with WP2.6’s new image handling features, so what you see above isn’t exactly what the iPhone did, but close.

The chaps at Cam-Trax have come up with a rather nifty bit of software that can turn practically any easily visible object and a cheap webcam into a game or PC controller.

I wish I could code that sort of stuff….

Now I’ll get back to working on SQL queries when I should actually be out partying…

I chanced upon a site listing the first 100 .com registrations ever made - and it rather startled me.  I started my IT career in 1987, first working as a printer operator on the mainframes at ICI, before moving to systems operations in at the beginning of 1988.  Later in 1988 I became a trainee programmer (my career never moved as fast as that first 12 month period!) and so I continued.

So when I took my first tentative steps in professional IT there had been fewer than 100 .coms registered.  Today there are over 76,000,000 active domains and over 280,000,000 that have been deleted, according to Domaintools.com.

Things have changed markedly in this industry.  21 years is nothing.  The internet has quite literally exploded around us.  I started surfing the World Wide Web in 1993 and frankly there was nothing much there.  It was hard to find sites, and performance was painful.  Running your own site was difficult, and it wasn’t until 1996 that I first registered a domain - at-speed.co.uk with the intention of creating an online resource for motorsport news.  It was a difficult but exciting experience, but I felt that it was too early - the Internet wasn’t really a mass market item yet, even though the potential was starting to be realised.  I had bugger all money at the time too, so needed to go out there and get a better paying job.  Interestingly I used to get e-mails from the UK Motorsport Index (which still has the same design as it did then!) complaining about our high budget approach being against the spirit of the web.  I doubt he realised that we had absolutely no money and everyone contributed their work for free.  One thing that was as true then as it is now is that good <> expensive.

So now where are we?  We have applications delivered via the browser, high performance search engines that actually work, and we enjoy the power of a huge number of free social services.  Many of these services are heavily funded and will require monetisation at some point, or they’ll close… that could be interesting.  Google managed the transition from a giveaway to a fee earning service without ever charging the people that made it successful.  Can the likes of flickr, Facebook and WordPress.com?

Time will tell…  What’s certain is that the pace of change, so marked over my career, is probably going to continue accelerating.  The next 21 years could be as equally fascinating…

One of the nicest things about modern tech is its ability to update itself.

A while back my PVR overnight gave itself lots of lovely features.

And today, my iPhone updated itself with some interesting new features when it went to version 1.1.3.

I’ve been thinking about buying a Nokia N95 - lovely looking phone.

Anyway, thanks to the wonders of Norlog I’ve got hold of a document that helps you to make sure that if you want to use the Satellite Navigation you won’t get hit by heavy roaming charges. It describes how to set up the phone so it won’t download maps willy-nilly (fine on T-Mobile’s excellent Web n Walk tariffs though) and how to get the maps in other ways.

Nokia N95 Basics - pdf file

Thanks go to Rich. Unless asked by him I won’t put any more info in case it gets anyone into trouble.

Incredible! I’ve just migrated the website across from the Yahoo server to our own server in the UK. Total outage time of less than half an hour. Incredible. Could have been better but Yahoo! don’t allow you to detach your domain from your hosting package without closing down your hosting. Still, it’s done now.

The key advantage should be that all users in Europe should see a dramatic improvement in performance. US users will see a bit of a slow-down. As visitors (nearly 5,000 a month now!) are spread around the globe it shouldn’t make much difference on average, but for me, the person who has to write the content, the site will be much quicker to use as I’m usually in Europe. Therefore updates should be just that little bit easier and quicker for me. Yay! I’m one very happy bunny….

Now to sort out the e-mail accounts. I just added the ‘almost’ bit to the headline as I’ve discovered that accented letters, and some commas, have been corrupted in the migration. Encoding issue somewhere, darn it. Bit of a case of the cobbler’s children here, because had I been doing this professionally it’s the kind of thing I’d have carefully checked for. But it’s my personal site, so of course I paid it no attention at all. Oh well! Some nifty SQL coming up, I think.

I’m posting this for the benefit of anyone who experiences a similar problem to mine when moving Wordpress from a directory into the web’s root directory.

What happened was that many links and pictures, some placed in there by plugins, others simply links that were typed in, had failed.

I realised that although I’d followed the migration instructions, a lot of things were left poorly sorted. A quick run through of all the tables showed where values were left incorrectly set. To fix this I wrote the following SQL statements and applied them to my database:

update wp_posts set guid = replace(guid,”/wordpress”,”");

update wp_postmeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value,”/wordpress”,”");

update wp_options set option_value = replace(option_value,”/wordpress”,”");

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,”/wordpress”,”");

These worked a treat.

To use this yourself I’ve done a version below that you can edit - simply replace $$$olddir$$$ with your old directory name (in my case wordpress) and replace $$$newdir$$$ with your new directory name. If your new directory is the root, remove the / at the beginning of each $$$newdir$$$ - see my example above.

A couple of warnings though - first take a backup of your database! Then think carefully - if you don’t know what you’re doing you may well be advised in seeking someone out who does.
update wp_posts set guid = replace(guid,”/$$$olddir$$$”,”/$$$newdir$$$”);

update wp_postmeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value,”/$$$olddir$$$”,”$$$newdir$$$”);

update wp_options set option_value = replace(option_value,”/$$$olddir$$$”,”$$$newdir$$$”);

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,”/$$$olddir$$$”,”$$$newdir$$$”);

Good luck and have fun!

Well… kind of. You won’t see much difference, but I’ve just upgraded the software for the blog to v2.0.1 - in reality it makes the blog a fair bit easier for me to use, but won’t make much of a difference to you except that with a bit of luck you’ll see better updates. The theme’s changed too, so the colours and layout may look a little different, but all the functions remain the same.
Of course, my trip’s over now, so the updates on here won’t be so frequent. However, there’s the background stuff I promised, and then there’ll be information and updates on my sprinting and hillclimbing this year. Within a short while I’m also hoping to sort out the upload of some pictures from the holiday. But there’s a lot to get through… I managed some 2000 photos in two months!