How not to treat your customers, an advanced lesson

This is not something I would normally post about but this example goes beyond the pale…

http://penny-arcade.com/resources/just-wow1.html

Adding a new CSS file to a custom WordPress Theme

If you want additional css files in your custom wordpress theme you can use the following.

1. Create a directory called css in your /wp-content/themes/themename/ directory
2. Upload the css files
3. Add this line to header.php

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="<?php echo get_template_directory_uri() ?>/css/custom-css-file.css" />

Yii drop down menu

Drop down menus won’t work as described in the CMenu reference.  After much scratching of the head I found an extension which was extremely simple to install and use.

MbMenu

Yii clean URL rewrites for static pages

I have just started writing a full site in PHP.  More details on what it is later but for now I will be posting snippets that I find useful as I work with Yii for the first time.

To get clean URL’s you need to do the normal stuff as per the Yii tutorials.  Including setting up a .htaccess to allow the index.php to be removed.

However even after doing this you will still see “site/page?view=about” when you click on the about menu item.  To fix this you need to add the following line to protect/config/main.php in the rule array.

‘about’ => array(‘site/page’, ‘defaultParams’ => array(‘view’ => ‘about’)),

After a page refresh you will now see hostname/about redirects to the correct page.

Goodbye Nokia, it’s been nice knowing you.

After Nokia’s decision to pretty much dump Symbian and drop MeeGo I was starting to think about alternative suppliers for my phones.

This is an incredibly hard decision as I have been a Nokia customer since 1996.  The 3 times I have used an alternate phone have either been disasters or have run side by side with current Nokia phone as follows;

Blackberry.  I had a Blackberry for the push email.  It was fantastic for this but I found it unusable as a phone partly due to it’s size but mostly due to it’s nasty user interface in comparison to the familiar Nokia one.

Motorola,  This was offered to me for free and it looked pretty.  I can’t remember which one but I couldn’t get on with the interface and dropped it in a drawer and went back to my Nokia.

iPhone,  The less said about this the better.  I knew I hated Apple Computers but I was taken with the iPod which I thought were perfect.  I was at that point carrying around a Nokia phone, a blackberry for email and an iPod touch.  I thought well it can’t be much different to an iPod touch which I loved so I bought one on an 18Month contract this mistake cost me almost £1,000 for something I tried valiantly to use for 2 weeks.  It also went in a drawer and I went back to my Nokia.

I was using a Nokia N900 and a Nokia E70.  The E70 was starting to fall to pieces and I was in the process of migrating to the N900.  I thought this will last me at least a year until the N9 comes to the UK and drops a little bit in price.  Guess what.  Nokia are not releasing the N9 in the UK.

I have decided now is the time to Jump ship before I spend too much time getting used to MaeMo/MeeGo etc.  I had another look at BlackBerrys and spoke to Orange.  They told me I have 14 days to return it if  I didn’t like it and it was a free phone for me on my contract.  It arrived yesterday and after much cursing (and not looking at the manual)  I have all my contacts across and the phone pretty much configured how I want it.

Guess What?   Not only is this the week I have dumped Microsoft and Moved 100% to Linux.  This is the week I dump Apple also.  The BlackBerry is a perfectly usable phone,  It is a perfectly usable music player and it is great for email.  I have already got all my music in DRM free format.  The only reason I need Windows/iTunes now is for the TV and Films I have already bought.

I am losing the best of breed for each feature I want but I am now down to running 1 computer and 1 phone.  I no longer need to carry multiple chargers or sync multiple devices etc etc.  I may not have the flashiness and slickness of the iPod touch.  The tiny size of my iPod nano.  I may not have a slick interface like my N900 or the cool flip open qwerty keyboard on my E70.  What I do have though is simplicity and I am starting to appreciate that already.  My desktop has become rather uncluttered all of a sudden and it’s very nice.

So Nokia have made some big mistakes in my view.  Moving to Windows and dropping Symbian and MeeGo were extremely serious.  The final straw was not releasing their N9 to the UK market.  They have totally disregarded my needs and requirements and I am guessing a lot of other users.  They have lost me as an extremely loyal Nokia fan and I won’t be coming back.  If the Blackberry ever loses my custom I will probably look at Android in future.  I will never have another Windows device as I have been stung to hard and too often in the past by Microsoft.

Back to XCFE4

After a few days with KDE I decided I didn’t like how buggy it was.  I have moved back to XFCE after trying a few others.  For me I wanted just enough features so I can get my work done without any pauses or glitches that will distract me.

I am not 100% happy with XFCE yet but each time something really starts to bug me I google it and find a bit of software or a feature to fix it.  After 4 days on XFCE I am now a convert and haven’t rebooted to windows in those 4 days.

I have my full development system up and running and it is much nicer than under windows.  I am playing with Inkscape to see if I am able to design a company website from scratch (should be interesting)

I can even watch iPlayer, movies etc without any problems .  I am still not happy about the sound system as it will randomly change volume and occasionally jump to 100%.  I think this is a fight between ALSA and PulseAudio but I don’t have time at the moment to investigate.

I am really happy as I have finally made the jump to full time Linux user on the DeskTop.  Yay

Hosts file for blocking ads and other unwanted crap. speeds up browsing also

I used to use a hosts file supplied by a website that has now ceased operations. http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html however  I found this new one from a slashdot post.

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Arch Linux review plus XFCE4 vs KDE

I have played with Ubuntu in the past and found it bloated and buggy.  I recently tried using Centos as a desktop OS as that is what I develop for and use mostly.  Unfortunately Centos whilst being a brilliant server OS is no good as a desktop unfortunately.

I have decided to give arch linux a go and other than the problem of not being familiar with it I have managed to get XFCE and KDE desktops up and running quite easily.

Arch Linux is a strange Distribution in that after you have installed it all you get is a prompt with no services running and no desktop.  It’s philosophy of keeping things simple doesn’t mean simple to use just simple full stop.  I like this as if I boot into XFCE it takes less than 12 seconds.

So starting from the beginning.  Installation is easy if you are familiar with partitioning a hard disk.  However this very experienced user still managed to screw his Windows 7 NTFS partition up.  But I always keep a backup of the partition so it only took half an hour to restore this.  Be very careful when deleting partitions and creating them using Arch….

I then got to the command prompt and started to try and learn about pacman the command line package manager.  The only internet connection I have currently is via a 3G dongle so getting this to work was my first job.  I used Sakis3G again and it worked immediately and without any issues.  I then had to figure out how to use Pacman which is very hard without a web browser and internet connection.  To cut a long story short you have to edit /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and uncomment the mirrors you want to use.  After this run the command pacman -Syy.   If you don’t run this command Pacman won’t work.  This is the bit that took me a while to figure out.  After this was done I installed XFCE4.

XFCE4 is a very basic but very fast desktop environment.  I quickly decided I didn’t like it for everyday use but is great for fast use.  I knew I wasn’t a huge fan of Gnome so decided to try the latest KDE.  Within minutes of installing it I was in love.  It may be slower than XFCE but boy is it pretty and fully featured.  I now know that providing I can get the rest of the system configured to my liking I will be sticking with Arch/KDE for the forseeable future.

So far the downside to Arch/KDE is that there is no graphical package manager that works fully.  So it is a case of searching online for the name of the package and then using pacman to install it.

I have firefox installed and a flash plugin working so far.  If the rest of the packages install as easily I can’t see any reason to go back to Windows 7 except for iTunes usage.

Upgrading to php 5.3 in Centos 5.6

Very simple to use repository at Atomic Corp. Thanks guys

http://www6.atomicorp.com/channels/atomic/

Centos 5.6 with Three 3g Dongle ZTE MF112

I am setting up a developement laptop that will connect to the internet using a Three 3G modem.  It is a ZTE MF112. This didn’t automatically work in Centos 5.6 and I had no other way of getting it connected to the net so this is what I eventually discovered.

1.  Update the Kernel.
2. Install Sakis3g

Sakis3G won’t work on the default Kernel and usb_modeswitch doesn’t help.

I retrieved the Kernel from ElRepo.org The most recent Kernel from there is 2.6.38 which is not too far from current.  There are quite a few errors upon boot up but none appear to be fatal so far.

Sakis3g is a single script that tries its best to get you connected to the internet with a 3g dongle.  The first time I ran it there were errors the second time it worked.  I think the first run through initialises the modem and the second actually connects.  It’s good enough for me.