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Showing posts from 2012

Upgrading Wordpress

I've had a couple of wordpress blog somehow get corrupted by evil persons who somehow got to upload content into them. These were 3.1 installs, but I've now removed the content and upgraded to the latest wordpress version. I've found the easiest way is to: download the latest version with wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip unzip the archive which will extract a directory 'wordpress' eg unzip wordpress-3.4.zip now copy the contents of the wordpress directory over the existing installation with cp -a .../wordpress/* .../mywpinstall Now hit the admin console and you may get a prompt to upgrade the database. If you want a really mad upgrade script, check out the Rimu Hosting script at http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2012/06/14/wordpress-mass-update-script-3-4/

When tests become hard

A friend contacted me for advice. He was having trouble writing a test for some code. I asked him to send me the code and the test so I could see what was going on. I encounter this problem quite frequently, so I thought I'd post one of my responses... Okay, here is where I think you are going wrong, and when writing tests becomes hard, it’s usually because of this. It’s important to layer your applications. Web/Services/DB – at least conceptually. What you have is a class that does everything. Web and Service. No-one can reuse your file processing logic without using the web, not even tests! A nice way to code would be to: Write a UNIT test that attempts to process a file. It passes in a file X and asserts that the result is Y. It won’t compile because you haven’t written the file processing code yet! Now you write the service which processes the file The test will compile and run now, but probably fail because you forgot something. Now you can fix your service And

Solved - Trouble with the Samsung Galaxy S 1 phone

My wife has had a Samsung Galaxy S1 Android phone for over a year now and its been great. Recently though, she'd been having terrible battery performance and had noticed that after charging the phone overnight, it was only at 50% in the morning. My first thought was to buy a new battery, but then I figured I'd try updating the firmware first. Thats when I discovered that windows couldn't recognise the device!! This was a big issue - how could I get all of her photos off the phone? Solutions: Quite by accident, she plugged her phone into an iCoustic USB charger that we got with an iPod accessory pack - this fully charged the battery and now there are no battery issues. She'd been using my iPad USB charger previously and for some reason, this makes a difference. I realized that when syncing the phone with Kies I wasn't using the original USB cable that came with the phone. We'd been using a third party cable we'd bought after losing the original one. Sinc

Grooveshark for listening to music

I've just started using Grooveshark.com for listening to music. Running in the browser, its a great cross platform solution - no installs necessary. I'm just running the browser on my MythTV media center, with the sound via the TV. The quality seems great, even though I've got it on the lower quality, and I'm hoping its just what I need to find some new and interesting music.

Fixing browser sound on Ubuntu 11.04

I've finally fixed sound via the browser on my Ubuntu 11.04 MythTV media center. MythTV was working fine, but the browsers never even tried to play sound (the sound settings would show NO applications using sound, when Chrome or Firefox should have been). The information I needed was here and I had no /etc/asound.conf so I had to put the following in ~/.asoundrc - pcm.pulse { type pulse } ctl.pulse { type pulse } pcm.!default { type pulse } ctl.!default { type pulse }