That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.

– Elizabeth Wurtzel

Wait, Week 05? What ever happened to Week 04? Well, my proper camera met with a bit of an accident back on Christmas day and it’s been finally sent in for repairs. It took me a bit to locate my old P&S ¹. Plus, I’ve just been feeling a bit down of late. When I first realized I’d missed week 04, I planned on posting 2 photos for week 05 to make up for it. Unfortunately, I’ve not been shooting as many images and this was the only halfway decent one of the few I did have. Maybe I’ll post an extra image later in the year to make up to week 04; we’ll just have to wait and see.

Side note: I’ve been working on a new theme for this site and unlike most themes I’ve done this time I plan to do it all from scratch (sort of). I’m using a combination of HTML5 Boilerplate an 960 Grid System to build it, rather than working with an existing WordPress theme. Why? In part because I’ve not worked with HTML5/CSS3 yet and want to and in part because I feel Ian Stewart’s right when he says You should be building your own WordPress Theme Framework. .… Make it your own. When you’re done you’ll have the best WordPress Theme — for you.

Week 05: Cage Without a Key © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Is today stupid driving day or something? I’ll grant I left for work a few minutes later than usual, but it seems odd that so many people would continually be pulling out into moving traffic (from driveways and side streets) and then going so slowly ². Fortunately the roads were relatively clean this morning, so I was able to stop before plowing into any of those idiots, but still.…
• Back in the day when Javascript was new to the web, many sites used it to frequently touch my browser in the bad way. So I quickly grew to hate it and pretty much ignored/disabled it for years. In more recent times, Javascript usage has grown up/cleaned up its act. To the point where I’m actually interested in learning to use it. So I’ve been searching around for some decent tutorials but haven’t had a lot of luck. Most tutorials either assume you already know quite a bit about Javascript or are so extremely dated that they’re useless. I did run across 2 sites with tutorials that don’t seem to be too awful: Codecademy ³ and jQuery for Absolute Beginners ⁴
• I’ve been thinking about about redesigning this site, but I’m trouble deciding what to do. I’ve got some ideas floating around in my skull, but I might hold off until I can look into working up a logo.

Brain Dump 01 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Then today they released an anonymized copy of the data as a compressed CSV file. I took a quick look at the CSV and whipped up the following MySQL script to load the data.

CREATE TABLE `survey` (
 `id` int(11)  NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `year_submitted` year,
 `how_use` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `job_type` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_do` text,
 `c_cms_blog` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_customize` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_number` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_percent` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_done_with_wp` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_living` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_do` text,
 `d_cms_blog` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_customize` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_number` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_percent` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_done_with_wp` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_cost` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_living` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `u_do` text,
 `u_installed` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `u_installed_other` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `u_customize` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `u_living` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `x_living` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE = MyISAM COMMENT = 'WordPress 2011 Survey Results';

LOAD DATA INFILE '/var/lib/mysql/anon-data.csv'
 INTO TABLE `survey`
 FIELDS ENCLOSED BY '"' TERMINATED BY ','
 LINES TERMINATED BY '\r'
 IGNORE 1 LINES
 (`how_use`, `job_type`, `c_do`, `c_cms_blog`, `c_customize`,
`c_number`, `c_percent`, `c_done_with_wp`, `c_living`, `d_do`, `d_cms_blog`,
`d_customize`, `d_number`, `d_percent`, `d_done_with_wp`, `d_cost`, `d_living`,
`u_do`, `u_installed`, `u_installed_other`, `u_customize`, `u_living`,
`x_living`);

UPDATE `survey` SET `year_submitted` = YEAR(NOW());

This has only been tested on MySQL 5.1.54-1ubuntu4. It should work on any recent copy of MySQL, but YMMV. Also, I added 2 additional fields to the table. One is a simple ID field to make it easier to reference individual responses while the other is ‘year_submitted‘. I added the latter field; so if they reuse this survey next year, I can simply add that year’s responses to the same table and track the differences. If I find the time, I may try digging into the data to see if I can find anything interesting in it (but don’t hold your breath on me finding the time to do so).

State of the Word © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I also noticed after the update that one of my client sites wasn’t working correctly. It turns out there’s a bug in WordPress 3.1 which breaks category exclusion. On my client’s site, I was using this code:

function exclude_category($query) {
$cat_id = '-'.get_cat_id('meetings');
if ( $query->is_home ) {
$query->set('cat', $cat_id);
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

Fortunately that bug I linked to also includes a workaround. By changing the above bit of code to read as follows, I was able to fix my client’s site. ^_^

function exclude_category($query) {
$cat_id = '-'.get_cat_id('meetings');
if ( $query->is_home ) {
$query->set('category__not_in', array($cat_id));
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

WordPress 3.1 is Out © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Some time back, my real job was cleaning out their inventory of older computer hardware. While it was old for the office, it was still newer than anything I had up and running around my house ¹ They had several laptops (in states of disrepair) of the same make/model ² as I currently use at work. Seeing how I kind of like my work laptop, I decided to grab the lot of them.

I then bought all the necessary parts to bring 2 of the laptops up to working order. Only while I was working on them, I noticed that one of the lot was based on an Intel+Nvidia chipset –the rest were AMD+ATI– and that one was slightly lighter weight than the others. As I was doing all the work finding, buying and rebuilding these laptops; I figured I’d treat myself to the Intel+Nvidia version of the laptop to enjoy the slightly lighter weight. I saved the rest of the lot to use for spare parts if/when it became necessary.

Then recently one of the fans in my laptop began making a horrible grinding noise whenever the CPU was under any kind of load. Tonight I got sick enough of the noise that I shutdown my laptop, pulled up the maintenance & service guide and got to work dissembling one of the spare parts laptops to get out the fan I need. It turns out that the fan dieing in my laptop is part of the fan assembly unit which cools the CPU. So the instructions for removing this piece are extensive, but in the end basically tell you to complete disassemble the entire laptop.

I’d nearly completely the disassembly of the spare parts laptop when I remembered that one was an AMD based machine and mine is based on Intel. But both machines are labeled as dv8000 and searching HP’s support website for manuals on the dv8000 only turns up AMD machines. Hmm, searching on the product number on the bottom of my laptop returns results for a HP Pavilion dv8230us. And while the manuals page for a dv8230us does link to the same maintenance & service guide; it also links to what it calls HP Pavilion dv8000 Notebook PC — Maintenance and Service Guide. However if you download & read the first page of this second m&s guide; you’ll find the file refers to dv8300. Though the details seem to be mostly the same as the dv8000, excepting that it uses Intel+Nvidia. One of the other minor details that was not the same was the part# for the fan assembly and from some quick googling on that; it would appear the fan assemblies in the AMD & Intel machines are not compatible with each other. *sigh* 3 hours down the drain.

Joys of Computers © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Initially when I setup the author page, I used the Cimy User Extra Fields plugin to get those extra fields; however in the words of Lord Downey, “It, uh … lacked elegance.” Don’t get me wrong, Marco Cimmino has created a very powerful and useful plugin. My problem is that it’s too complicated for what I want to do. Then almost as though the WordPress developers read my mind, the release of WordPress 2.9 included a new filter making it simple to add/remove new fields to the user profile page.  So easy in fact that the following bit of PHP code added to my theme’s function.php file was all that was required to add the fields I needed.

function vl2_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
 // Add Twitter
 $contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter';
 //add Facebook
 $contactmethods['facebook'] = 'Facebook';
 //add flickr
 $contactmethods['flickr'] = 'Flickr';
 //add linkedin
 $contactmethods['linkedin'] = 'LinkedIn';
 //add delicious
 $contactmethods['delicious'] = 'Delicious';
 //add phone
 $contactmethods['phone'] = 'Phone';
 //add phone-type
 $contactmethods['phonetype'] = 'Phone Type';
 //add locality
 $contactmethods['locality'] = 'Locality';
 //add region
 $contactmethods['region'] = 'Region';
 //add postalcode
 $contactmethods['postalcode'] = 'Postal Code';
 //add country
 $contactmethods['country'] = 'Country';

 return $contactmethods;
 }
 add_filter('user_contactmethods','vl2_contactmethods',10,1);

Of course just storing the info with the user’s profile isn’t enough; we also need to be able to pull it back out. This can be done using either the_author_meta or get_the_author_meta. I ended up using get_the_author_meta for two reasons:

1. I’m pulling the author’s meta info outside of the Loop.
2. I wanted to return, not echo the values, so I can manipulate them before displaying them.

But that still wasn’t complicated enough, after all I started this project wanting to generate an hCard, using some jQuery UI to give it a fancy accordion effect. First we load the javascript for that accordion effect, by adding the following to our author.php file.

<script type="text/javascript">
 $(function() {
 $("#accordion").accordion();
 });
 </script>

Next we get all the user fields by:

<?php if(isset($_GET['author_name'])) :
 // NOTE: 2.0 bug requires: get_userdatabylogin(get_the_author_login());
 $curauth = get_userdatabylogin($author_name);
 $id = $curauth->ID;
 else :
 $curauth = get_userdata(intval($author));
 $id = $curauth->ID;
 endif;

 $twitter = get_the_author_meta('twitter', $id);
 $flickr = get_the_author_meta('flickr', $id);
 $linkedin = get_the_author_meta('linkedin', $id);
 $delicious = get_the_author_meta('delicious', $id);
 $lastfm = get_the_author_meta('lastfm', $id);
 $phone = get_the_author_meta('phone', $id);
 $ptype = get_the_author_meta('phone-type', $id);
 $addr = get_the_author_meta('addr', $id);
 $locality = get_the_author_meta('locality', $id);
 $region = get_the_author_meta('region', $id);
 $postalcode = get_the_author_meta('postalcode', $id);
 $country = get_the_author_meta('country', $id);
 ?>

Now that we’ve got the data and the JavaScript; we need to combine it

<div id="authorbox">
 <?php if (function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar((get_the_author_meta('user_email', $id)), '120'); }?>
 <div id="accordion">
 <h3><a href="#">About</a> <span><span><?php echo $curauth->first_name; ?></span> <span><?php echo $curauth->last_name; ?></span></span></h3>
 <div id="about">
 <p><?php echo $curauth->description; ?></p>
 </div> <!-- #about -->
 <h3><a href="#">Contact</a></h3>
 <div id="contact">
 <p><span><span><?php echo $ptype; ?></span><a href="callto:<?php echo $phone; ?>"><?php echo $phone; ?></a></span></p>
 <p"><a href="<?php echo get_the_author_meta('user_url', $id); ?>" rel="me"><?php echo get_the_author_meta('user_url', $id); ?></a></p>
 <p><span><?php echo $addr; ?></span><br/>
 <span><?php echo $locality; ?></span>, <span><?php echo $region; ?></span> <span><?php echo $postalcode; ?></span><br/><span><?php echo $country; ?></span></p>
 </div> <!-- #contact -->
 <h3><a href="#">Networks</a></h3>
 <div id="social-networks">
 <ul>
 <li><a title="View <?php echo $curauth->first_name; ?> <?php echo $curauth->last_name; ?>'s Profile" href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/<?php echo $linkedin ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/linkedin.png" alt="LinkedIn" width="48" height="48" /></a></li>
 <li><a title="Follow <?php echo $twitter ?> on Twitter" href="http://twitter.com/<?php echo $twitter ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/twitter.png" width="48" height="48" alt="Twitter" /></a></li>
 <li><a title="See <?php echo $flickr ?>'s photostream" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/<?php echo $flickr ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/flickr.png" alt="Flickr" width="48" height="48" /></a></li>
 <li><a title="<?php echo $delicious ?>'s Bookmarks" href="http://delicious.com/<?php echo $delicious ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/delicious.png" alt="Delicious" width="48" height="48" /></a></li>
 </ul>
 </div> <!-- #social-networks -->
 <h3><a href="#"><?php echo $curauth->first_name; ?>'s Last 5 Posts</a></h3>
 <?php $my_query = new WP_Query('showposts=5&author='.$id); ?>
 <div id="5posts">
 <ul>
 <?php if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
 <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> <?php the_time('j F Y'); ?></li>
 <?php endwhile; ?>
 </ul>
 </div> <!-- #5posts -->
 </div><!-- #accordion -->
 </div><!-- #authorbox -->
 <?php else : ?>
 <h2>Not Found</h2>
 <p>Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>
 <?php endif; ?>

Oops, I almost forgot to mention; we need to make sure we’re loading jQuery & jQuery UI on the author page. Since I separate out the header stuff into it’s own file (header.php); I added this bit of code before the closing </head> tag in that file:

<?php //if (is_author()) wp_enqueue_script('jquery-ui-core');
if (is_author()) {
 wp_deregister_script('jquery');
 wp_register_script('jquery', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"), false, '');
 wp_deregister_script('jquery-ui-core');
 wp_register_script('jquery-ui-core', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.2/jquery-ui.min.js"), array('jquery'), '');
 wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
 wp_enqueue_script('jquery-ui-core');
} ?>

And that’s that. Now my author page will by default display my gravatar next to the Biographical Info entered in my profile. There will also be three other section available…

* Contact: Gives selected contact information for me.
* Networks: Displays icons for some social networks I use with links to my profiles on those networks.
* Last 5 Posts: Shows my latest posts.

Later when I have more time, I’ll update the zipped copy of the VectorLover2 theme on this site for people who want to download a complete copy of the code I used for the author pages.

Update: I forgot to thank Joost de Valk for his excellent article, User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9.
Update 2: I changed the code to register jquery-ui-core, so that it recognizes jquery as a dependency. This tutorial had been working fine; but for whatever reason, it suddenly was trying to load jQuery after jQuery-UI (which doesn’t work so good).
Update 3: Hmm, now that I look back at this old post I realize a couple of things: 1) several of the links I’d intended to be here are missing (since corrected) and 2) this post was written worse than I thought it was.

Author Pages with hCard & jQuery © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

	if ( $options['menuLayout'] == NR_MENU_SINGLE ) {

		add_menu_page('Now Reading', 'Now Reading', 9, 'admin.php?page=add_book', 'now_reading_add');

		add_submenu_page('admin.php?page=add_book', 'Add a Book', 'Add a Book',$nr_level , 'add_book', 'now_reading_add');

		add_submenu_page('admin.php?page=add_book', 'Manage Books', 'Manage Books', $nr_level, 'manage_books', 'nr_manage');

		add_submenu_page('admin.php?page=add_book', 'Options', 'Options', 9, 'nr_options', 'nr_options');

To read like this:

	if ( $options['menuLayout'] == NR_MENU_SINGLE ) {

		add_menu_page('Now Reading', 'Now Reading', 9, 'add_book', 'now_reading_add');

		add_submenu_page('add_book', 'Add a Book', 'Add a Book',$nr_level , 'add_book', 'now_reading_add');
		add_submenu_page('add_book', 'Manage Books', 'Manage Books', $nr_level, 'manage_books', 'nr_manage');
		add_submenu_page('add_book', 'Options', 'Options', 9, 'nr_options', 'nr_options');

Then Now-Reading’s single admin menu worked properly again.

Fixing Now-Reading’s Admin Menu © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

py2avi released! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

First up the minor problem, after rebooting into the new hotness of Ubuntu 9.04, I was greeted with a pop-up windo telling me “There was an error while performing indexing : Index corrupted.” The pop-up gave 3 options: “Ok”, “Cancel” or “Reindex all contents”. I tried all 3 but the pop-up kept coming back even after multiple reboots. The only thing I could initiall figure out to do was to kill the tracker
ps -ef | grep tracker
kill -9 XXXX XXXX XXXX

Yes, I know that’s probably a horrible idea but I rarely use the tracker’s search on my home PC so pbbbhhhhttt! A quick Google search later, I found a bug report on LaunchPad about it under which I found these instructions:
sudo aptitude install tracker-utils
tracker-processes -r

I apparently already had the tracker-utils  installed, so the first didn’t do anything for me. The second command above however shutdown the tracker and removed the indexes, so the tracker was able to recreate them cleanly. Since running those commands, the pop-up hasn’t come back.

Now on to the fun with the major problem. This was a case of network failure, specifically wireless network failure. While this is a desktop PC, I live in an old house without network cabling and my PC sits too far away from the ideal location for the router to run a cable. So I have a D-Link PCI wireless NIC in my desktop.  The NIC is based on the Atheros AR5413 chipset, Network performance has never been as good as a wired connection but it had been acceptable until this upgrade to 9.04 when the wireless stopped working.

I had been using ndiswrapper to load the windows driver for the card but that suddenly stopped working. I could see all the wireless networks in my neighborhood, but couldn’t connect to any of them (either networks secured with WPA or wide open ones). I started doing some research into the problem using other computers with working internet connections. I found that my router was getting blacklisted while my desktop was trying to connect and then it would timeout without ever making a network connection.

Also while researching the problem, I found out that there was now a new, open source driver which should be working with my wireless NIC (ath5k).  So I removed ndiswrapper, and tried out this new driver. Alas it wans’t particularly stable, dropping connection ever couple of minutes. However since my wireless NIC uses an Atheros based chipset, I had another option. I installed the madwifi driver via jockey-gtk (Ubuntu’s tool for installing restricted modules/drivers).  For whatever reason, activating the driver via jockey-gtk didn’t actually get it up and running. To test it, I used:

sudo modprobe ath_pci

To actually get the driver to load on every boot, I edited my /etc/modules file to include ath_pci.

The madwifi driver doesn’t appear to make as strong a connection as the ath5k did; the gnome network manager applet shows the connection under madwifi usually has ~45–55% signal strength (under ath5k & ndiswrapper I could get as high as 70%). However I’ve yet to lose a connection to my network while using the madwifi wrapper whereas ath5k would drop connection every couple of minutes and ndiswrapper would usually drop the connection at least once an hour (back on Ubuntu 8.10 where it actually worked for me). Also the madwifi driver allows me to connect to my network on boot-up; unlike ndiswrapper which always took some time to connect after I was booted up and signed in. So overall, I’m pleased with my new networking setup but would have been more pleased if the changes I made could have been done automagically by the upgrade process or if the upgrade process at least warned me that it might break my networking setup.

Jaunty Upgrade After Effects © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Please use the google addons.
Right now google addons is more in sync.

Sometimes I use my personal googlecode just to back stuff up, or sync it between my home computer and the one at work. Anytime I’m ready for you guys to try something out I’ll just stick it in the google addons svn & if it’s broken I’ll just revert it.

Which is a good tip as the thread has links to a wide variety of versions of the plugin scattered throughout its 45 pages.  Unfortunately the tip does not really clear things up in my particular case.  As I stated previously I’m using a copy of the plugin from xbmc-hulu. The developer who made the above comment is recommending people use the version of the plugin from xbmc-addons instead of his personal version at rwparris2-xbmc-plugins but makes no mention of the version at xbmc-hulu which shows that developer’s username as one of the project owners.

Bah.

I suppose I’ll just have to download the xbmc-addons version of the hulu plugin, try it out and compare it to the xbmc-hulu version.  As soon as I’ve had a moment to do so, I’ll post my results.

UPDATE: I’m not seeing any difference between the xbmc-addons & xbmc-hulu versions so far.  However after reading the thread on XBMC Forums, I did go through the trouble of configuring the plugin (under the XBox version -> Videos -> Plugins -> Hulu -> press the white button on your controller).  Setting a default video quality makes using the plugin much nicer (cuts out 2–3 button presses when trying to watch a specific video).  You can enter your Hulu account username/password but there doesn’t appear to be a benefit to doing so yet.

UPDATE2:Per the XBMC Forums, xbmc-hulu has been removed in favor the version available via XBMC SVN Repo Installer and the SVN Repo Installer pulls from xbmc-addons.

UPDATE: Per the XBMC-Hulu plugin release thread, there is no currently working version of the plugin.

XBMC-Hulu Update © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.