I’m a long-time WordPress user. I’ve been using it since, I believe, pre-1.0 days. Over time, the database schema and database have grown and changed. The cruft has grown. In version 2.2 of WordPress, it became possible to set the character set encoding that WordPress uses. The default is UTF-8. Unfortunately, the default for the database was Latin-1. This could lead to some problems and the Flicker Photo Album for WordPress almost requires that this get fixed up.

Luckily for me — since I know next-to-nothing about character set encoding — Joe also included a link to this page, talking about the database character set. That page, in turn, led to this page, explaining ways to convert. All gung-ho to convert, I follow the SQL and after obtaining the OK of my fellow WordPress users on this system, I planned a little outage for the conversion.

Sadly, the conversion on that page didn’t work. Luckily, I did have a backup and I did find this page. I copied that backup file, fired up vim, did a little “:%s/latin1/utf8/g”, saved, and dropped/created the new database, and inserted the edited backup. After editing the wp-config.php files to include “define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);”, things are back up and they look happy.

Now, to try out that Flicker Photo Album for WordPress plugin. Good thing I’m on vacation these next couple weeks.

Oh, by the way, the Subversion upgrade option for WordPress rocks.

Now, to find one in the area that’s not too freaking expensive.

Even better is the fact that Gracie can use it too. She’ll ask if she can watch a movie or play a game on it and off she’ll go with it. This _never_ could have happened with the Q.

echo - - - >/sys/class/scsi_host/host$NUMBER/scan

$NUMBer is usually 0, but if you have more SCSI busses, you need to verify.

For more information on this, check here.

2008-01-04 23:22:59,963 main WARN [core.entity.transaction.JNDIFactory] [ConnectionFactory.getConnection] Failed to find DataSource named java:comp/env/jdbc/JiraDS in JNDI server with name default. Trying normal database. javax.naming.NamingException: Could not create resource factory instance [Root exception is java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSourceFactory]

…the problem is with the distro’s use of the Jakarta Commons version of DBCP and Tomcat’s expectation that the BasicDataSourceFactory class being in Tomcat’s naming-factory-dbcp.jar file. For whatever reason, the distro preferred the Jakarta version.This can be simply solved by adding the following to your JAVA_OPTS environmental variable:

-Djavax.sql.DataSource.Factory=org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSourceFactory

…which is most likely in /etc/sysconfig/tomcat5.To give credit where credit is due, I found most of my info about this problem and the solution here.

May I never waste more time on this problem.

Technorati Tags: frustration, java, programming, sysadmin, throw the computer across the farking room, tomcat

See? Told you is wasn’t anything special, but at least you don’t have to type in a YouTube URL into your AppleTV. What a pain that on-screen keyboard is.

Technorati Tags: apple tv, YouTube, television

Technorati Tags: wordpress

After about a month’s delay, it finally arrived this past Thursday. The setup was dead simple. Plugged the component video and optical audio outputs into my receiver, where I linked the two together as one device. Turned on the TV, then powered up the unit. Not including the run out to Radio Shack for an optical cable and dinner at Friendly’s with G, the setup probably took five minutes at most. And, yes, it works fine on our seven-year-old HD (1080i) capable, 4:3 screen. (Side note: the initial boot on our 4:3 screen had the Apple logo a bit distorted as it was assuming the TV would be running in a 16:9 aspect ratio. After you go through the setup, though, the problem disappears.)

The Apple TV allows you to sync on iTunes to the device itself. Other (Windows or OS X) computers that want to display iTunes content on the screen will have to stream to the device. There’s a five streaming device limit. I have no idea why.

Our home network as two access points. One’s an open 802.11G AP. The other device is a closed Airport Extreme that does 802.11 (pre-)N. To avoid a performance hit on the pre-N network, we keep both devices running. Lisa’s first-gen MBP, without (pre-)N talks with the G AP and my second-gen, (pre-)N capable MBP talks with the Airport. The Apple TV also talks with the Airport as it’s also a (pre-)N device.

Since Lis will be the one most using our TV and is connecting over the slower of the two APs, I set her up as the sync source. I sync to the Apple TV. (Well, my MBP does. )

Overall, I like the Apple TV. Here are a few thoughts I have on it:

• I’m a bit concerned about the 40GB hard drive on the device. We’re only about 1/3 used now that all of Lisa’s content is synced over, but I can see this growing quickly. From what I’ve seen on the inter-tubes, though, this might be not-too-annoying to swap out.  [Update: Well, hey-ho-howdy, here's one.]
• The interface feels a bit slow. It’s not terribly slow, but it is a bit.
• It crashed at least once on me. On the plus side (or worrisome — depending on your perspective), it has a watchdog timer that auto-rebooted it after it locked up. This is a 1.0 device, though, so I’ll give it some leeway, as long as it’s not very frequent.
• Entering a 50-character, random character string as the WPA2 key using their sluggish on-screen keyboard interface is a pain in the ass. Entering it a second time after you have a brain fart is even more of a PITA.
• I was surprised that the device doesn’t aggregate the iTunes sources that it’s configured for. You have to explicitly choose the source iTunes DB that you use.
• Apple’s remote-enabled devices (such as Lisa’s and my MBPs and the Apple TV) allow you to pair with a specific remote, which makes the device ignore all other Apple Remote signals. As far as I can tell, they will respond to any Apple Remote by default. This is really fun when you’re sitting back on the couch with two MBPs and you hit play on the remote; all three devices respond by playing different things. On the plus side, the Apple Remote has a very wide range of coverage.
• Speaking of the Apple Remote, it’s a very simple device. It’s got six buttons: up, down, left, right, play/pause, and menu. Using this remote to watch Lost on my laptop’s screen with Front Row was easy, but, for whatever reason, I’m having issues controlling playback with it on the Apple TV.
• Streaming is surprisingly smooth, from both of our MBPs. It thought it might get a but chunky with Lisa’s over the 802.11G network, but it’s not.
• Good Lord, I really don’t like that default Ken Burns effect in the slide show mode. I need to find out how to turn that off.
• I had some DRM (grrrr!) issues trying to get some TV shows from my MBP to stream to the Apple TV. Eventually, I read on the Apple forums that I had to de-authorize my MBP, then re-authorize. After this, there was no problem.
• I was also surprised that, while you get lots of previews of songs, movies, and TV shows from the Apple TV interface, you can’t directly purchase anything from that interface. How long do you think until that’s enabled? I can’t see Apple not making it easier for people to buy from their store.

Anyway, I like the Apple TV. It’s got a lot of potential, but it’s still got some rough edges. Still, it’s a good, useful device now. I think it’d give it a 4 out of 5.

Technorati Tags: airport extreme, gadgets, geeky, apple tv, review, wireless

“No problem!” thought I. “I’ll just find an online source, find the right format, some magic happens, then, *Poof!* schedule.”

I created a new gCal, made a few entries, then exported it to iCal (VCAL?) format. Looked around the internets and found a good schedule on the ESPN site. A little cut&paste later and I had a nice, one-game-per-line entry for the month of April. Wash, rinse, repeat for May through September.

Looking through the iCal, I could make out the parts pretty easily. Some of the fields were a little odd, but they didn’t look like anything I needed to bother with. I decided to repeat them verbatim. I whipped up a Python script, knocked out a couple silly bugs, then produced the full, iCal-formatted file. Google Calendar didn’t like importing it.

“No problem!” thought I. “I’ll just tweak some of the vcal…. There.”

“What? Still not importing?”

“Hmmm, OK, I’ll tweak this vcal…. There.”

“What?!?! Freaking vcal! I wonder if Apple’s iCal can read it.”

“Oh, nice. iCal reads it but gCal won’t. Heeeeey…. iCal has an export function…”

And that’s how I wound up — more or less — with a fully public, shared 2007 New York Yankees game schedule.

I think the problem was that every line in the Google Calendar-compatible file needed to be terminated with a ^M (ctrl-M). I still haven’t figured out how to get Python to print a literal ^M character. I thought it involved raw strings, but that didn’t help any. I figure I might have to try Unicode strings and embed the hex value of ^M in the string, but I didn’t know the right value and didn’t want to spend too much more time on the issue, especially since I already had my gCal set up.

Oh, and that program I wrote? I found out later on that I could have just manipulated the schedule files I got from ESPN and saved them as a CSV and imported them. Much less work there. Oh well. Live and learn.

Technorati Tags: ical, programming, Python, geeky, funny, google calendar, Yankees