June 2007 Archives
Next week we'll be going camping in France. That means amongst others that we will be making quite some kilometres, and if you know me a little bit you know that I am not that fond of travelling large hours. One way to make the trip more pleasant is music.
The traditional source of music was the radio, but when travelling long distances in several countries, you'll loose your station every two hours. The past years we brought some CDs with us, but CDs are bulky and we can only take a few of them.
For this year's trip, I bought a Belkin TuneBase FM, allowing us to listen to all the music stored on MJ's iPod.
The TuneBase converts the iPod into a radio station. It has four button to select pre-stored frequencies and up and down buttons for manually selecting frequencies. All we have to do is tune our car radio to the TuneBase frequency, and we can listen to all the music stored on the iPod.
We're ready for the trip!
Every once in a while when I log into Movable Type, I am happily greeted by the following message:
If I press the 'Begin update' button, Firefox will crash. So I open good ol' Internet Explorer, and update the database. After that I switch back to Firefox and go to phpMyAdmin to fix the mt_permissions table.
I love beta software!
when the message Please wait while we install product X. This may take several minutes
stays on screen for almost two hours.
Last week Six Apart released the beta for Movable Type version 4. Until last weekend I didn't have the time to have a look at it, but Sunday I downloaded the files and copied them to my server.
Of course things went wrong, as was to be expected with a beta release. I know that you never should install beta releases on a production environment, but I took the risk anyway as this weblog is partly a playing ground. I am a long-time Movable Type user, and suspect that my database is full of legacy data of old settings and plugins.
After copying the files, I went to the new MT Dashboard, and found out that all images had been scrambled. I suspected that my FTP application accidentally had uploaded them in ASCII mode, so copied them again in binary mode, without result. I checked the files I had downloaded from Six Apart, and yes, they were scrambled as well. So I downloaded the tar.gz file instead of the zip, uploaded the images again, and the images came up correctly.
The second problem I encountered was more serious. The dashboard showed up OK, but whenever I tried to access one of the blogs, I got an error message:
invalid permissions for author 1 at lib/MT/Author.pm line 337This one took a little bit more to solve, but at the end I found out that newly created users don't have this problem. After comparing all settings in the database between my old users and the new user, I found the culprit: In the table mt_permission I found duplicate record for my user ID with permision_blog_id = 0. After removing the duplicate records, the error did not appear any more.
Now I am able to get into my blogs, and as you see, write new items. However, as soon as I publish a new entry I get another error message: Fallback Is Required At Lib/mt/util.pm Line 1331. I haven't solved this error yet, but found out that I can simply rebuild my site to make the entry appear.
As you can see, I also changed the design of the site. I was getting fed up with the previous design, and at the same time wanted to see what new template features came with MT4, so I reset the templates to the new minimalist theme. The coming days I will be studying and tweaking this design to my own tastes, so things might change a little bit. One thing I noticed already is that the default templates do not use the widget manager, basically because the new sidebar template module offers filtering by template type, giving the possibility to show a different sidebar on different types of pages. Other things they copied from WordPress are Pages and a file manager -- with tagging!!! --
There are still some other things to be fixed, such as activating trackbacks -- in the blog's configuration I see that this has been deactivated on a system level, which is not the case. So far I like MT4 a lot. It is fast, pleasant looking and I am happy with new features such as the file manager, entry auto-save and interactive template errors.
Mark, a loving husband, was in trouble. He forgot his wedding anniversary and his wife was really ticked off with him.
She told him, "tomorrow morning I expect to find a gift in the driveway that goes from 0 to 200 in under 6 seconds, AND IT BETTER BE THERE."
The next morning, Mark got up really early before work. When his wife woke up a couple of hours later, she looked out the window, and sure enough, there was a small gift-wrapped box sitting in the middle of the driveway.
Confused, the wife put on her robe, ran out to the driveway, and took the box into the house. She opened it, and found a brand new bathroom scale.
Mark is not yet well enough to have visitors ...
Via Michael Sampson
