Another 15 minutes

Alot of people seem to have problems with auto-updating WordPress to version 2.8.2 with the processes freezing at download, stuck with message the the file is being downloaded but nothing ever happens. This only seem to happen on some blogs, 2 out of my 3 blogs worked just fine, but one needed more help.

The problem seem to be with some plugin. Here is what you do to successfully get the update through. Go to the plugin page, select “Active” plugins and then use bulk action to deactivate all active plugins. Don’t worry if you have many plugins already deactivated and don’t want to manually activate the ones you actually used one by one, you can activate them just as easy. Now proceed with the core upgrade, it should go through right away. Then, go to the plugins page again, select “Recently active” plugins and then bulk action activate them again. All done!

If you run your WordPress blog on some hosting partner you probably have the automatic updates of WordPress core and plugins working, but if you ever setup your own Linux server and trying to run WordPress on it, it is likely that this will not work out of the box, especially if you’re running multiple websites on the same server.

I don’t want to use some 3rd party plugin for this to work or FTP, so I investigated what it is that makes it work in my hosting partners server, but not my own. I figured it was some PHP configuration missing but it was much simpler than that.

continue reading…

This will be my first post in Swedish since it only applies to Sweden.

Jag har skapat en ny liten enkel men rolig sida, www.vardagsmysterier.se, där man kan dela med sig av sina observationer om konstiga saker i vardagen och vardagsmysterier samt lite förklaringar på vanliga frågor man ofta undrar över. Än så länge är sidan inte så välfylld, men jag valde att lägga ut den ändå. Jag sökte lite inspiration i helgen på nya sidor och detta är ett av resultaten efter ett par timmars knappande.

This is a pretty cool and funny song by “The lonely island”, called “Jizz in my pants” :). The same people that made that “Dick in a box”-song on SNL. With more serious lyrics this song would be very nice, I like the tune and chorus, but even with this lyrics it’s a nice sound to it. They have gotten a huge amount of views on YouTube so I guess I’m not the only one who like it, hehe.

It actually wasn’t so many years ago one was playing the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) 8-bit gaming console for hours at a time and suffering from a Nintendo-thumb. It’s mindblowing when you think about the progress made since then. When you look at the graphics possible back in the late 1980′s it’s laughable, but very nostalgic for people born in the 1970′s, like me, who used play these games. One game in particular bring back alot of memories for me, “Castle Vania”. It brings back bitter sweet memories of incredible frustration and happy simple times. I found a site some time ago where you can actually play pretty much all those old Nintendo games as they were, right from the web in your browser using Java. Just look at the graphics, hear the sounds, it makes me wonder what the hell we were thinking. But ofcourse it was state of the art back then, ah it makes me smile. Play this game, and many more at www.virtualnes.com, sometimes it’s just fun to look at them again to remember.

Castle Vania, anyone else played this game? I don’t remember it as this ugly, hehe.

Today I decided to try out Internet Explorer 8 (beta 2) on a virtual machine running Windows XP. At first glance it looks just like IE7, but with a few more buttons and menues. The main new feature is probably that IE8 can suggest sites with relevant content to the ones you have recently visited by a click of a button.

You can also re-open tabs you have closed, sort of a new version of website history, which I think is very nice, as seen in the picture.

There is also a feature to use “InPrivate Browsing” which is browsing websites but not let IE save any data from the sites and share them with other sites, such as cookies, and the history will be deleted when you close the tab.

You can also select compatibility view to pages designed for older browser still will look OK, and there’s also a “smartscreen filter” that scans the websites for malicious content, and ofcourse all the old features of IE7 is all there what I could see. There are also these little helpful new things that sometimes really comes in handy, for example the “duplicate tab” option to open a new tab with the same URL as the current one.

I think that IE8 will be a very good browser, but the biggest leap forward was from version 6 to 7 with the introduction of tabs for IE, even though version 8 will improve it yet again. I like it.

Today I found a link in a forum to something called the Wayback Machine. It’s basically a search engine just like Google, but the they have saved data from way back, and not overwriting it with the latest version. I could actually look up my old sites and see how they looked back in 1999 and even download some old lost softwares I programmed back then, great fun! I wonder if they even work on Windows XP, hehe. You just enter an URL and you get the results in a timeline and click on the date you’d like to see what the site looked like on. This is ofcourse old news, but it’s fun to look back on the sites you forgot all about. It’s like “Googling” yourself but with a stronger sense of a trip down memory lane.