Just upgraded the blog to WordPress 3.0 – two clicks and I was done – can it get any simpler? What a pleasant surprise compared to the pile of crap that CS 2007+ turned out to be. Try upgrading that in something like two clicks? Ha! Well done WordPress!
Jun 21 2010
What we have learned …
… the average wife spends nearly 8,000 minutes a year nagging her husband!
Mar 11 2010
Forbes rich list
Forbes rich list is Slim pickings. Only lack of ability, inheritance and money keeps the rest of us off the Forbes list of world’s billionaires. It’s not fair? Here is Guardian’s recipe for billionaire success: get born into a rich family, invent something and sell it to Americans. Win. 
Feb 14 2010
Bing Maps adding Flickr images, live video, stars
Bing Maps adding Flickr images, live video and stars – very cool.
Update: The official TED video below is quite cool and in addition to the one above, also adds more interesting features such as video – check it out.
Jan 24 2010
Win 3.1 experience in your browser
If you ever wanted a Win 3.1 experience in your broswer (why I cannot imagine – despite me running a VM), then check out michaelv.org. The irony of all of this is that there is a modern browser in that which seems to be compliant with the standards (it pases the ACID2 tests; fails the ACID3). 
Jan 10 2010
Permalinks don’t support quotes?
I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug or a configuration issue either with WordPress itself or how the web server is configured where this blog is hosted. I just posted something about compiler errors where the permalink had a single quotes in its title like : ‘qpainter-painter’-has-initialiser-but-incomplete-type. While this was handled fine by WordPress (I could successfully preview the post as well), once it was published I got the generic 500 Internal Server Error as shown below. So the question is what is wrong (if anything)? What is the expected behaviour? The only way for me to fix it was by removing the single quote in the permalinks as now you can see in the post.
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, [email-address-removed] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Jan 07 2010
WordPress ping list
I updated the ping list for the blog based on the suggestions from Vladimir which I found via WordPress’s documentation site. Not sure if it is of any help or not, but I guess I will find out.
Dec 24 2009
Upgraded to WordPress 2.9
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and wow what a pleasant experience compared to Community Server 2007! Excluding backing up the DB and the site, the actual upgrade took only a few seconds and was so painless! Such a different experience from Community Server 2007, which was so much more difficult. Loving WordPress and all the add-ins and the goodness of the communities! 
Dec 08 2009
10 must have WordPress plugins
If you search online you will loads of ‘best plugin lists’ for WordPress, however of the lot that I have seen I truly think that this one is certainly one of the best ones.
Dec 05 2009
Want Virtual Snow on your site?
If you want virtual snow (probably nicer than the real stuff as there is no slush left to clean up) then check out Snowstorm: JavaScript snow effect for HTML. Be warned though – this uses a lot of CPU on the computer redendering the page and it will slow things down. Quite cool though.
Dec 02 2009
Redirects setup
After moving the blog to WordPress, almost all my redirects should work now from the old blog posts to the new one. For example if you click on this old url http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/archive/2009/10/25/installing-openscenegraph-on-ubuntu.aspx it should redirect you and you see the new and correct url.
Overall it was simple to setup via the .htaccess file and some simple regex. The only thing I found the hard way was that I should be using “RedirectMatch” when setting up the regex rule rather than the “Redirect” which is what I was using. You would use Redirect when trying to redirect without any variables.
So, as in my case I wanted to redirect from the old url (of community server) to the new one (of wordpress)
- Old: http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/archive/2009/10/25/installing-openscenegraph-on-ubuntu.aspx
- New: http://desigeek.com/blog/amit/2009/10/25/installing-openscenegraph-on-ubuntu/
So I need to make the following changes:
- Change the “/weblog” to “/blog”
- Get rid of “/archive”
- Get red of the “.aspx” extension
The following rule helped me achieve this:
RedirectMatch 301 /weblog/amit/archive/([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])/([0-9][0-9])/([0-9][0-9])/(.*)\.aspx$ http://desigeek.com/blog/amit/$1/$2/$3/$4
Of course there are a few more rules I have which I cannot go into details.
Along the way i also discovered a few interesting tools which can help you view the results – one is LiveHTTPHeaders; another good one is http://web-sniffer.net/.
If you are new to this, then a few very good tools online. I would suggest start with this post from Zo and this tutorial on regex.
i still have one outstanding issue where if I want to redirect part of the URL and not the complete thing, I am not sure how to do it. For example if I want to redirect the old url above to just the year/month of the post instead if the actual post, not sure how to go about doing it. So I want the url below to map to the the one below that.
- URL to Map: http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/archive/2009/10/25/installing-openscenegraph-on-ubuntu.aspx
- Should map to: http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/archive/2009/10/
Nov 26 2009
Linux Hater blog
I was looking for something else and came across the Linux Hater Blog. I am not a Linux hater (am writing this on Ubuntu). Some people might think this is funny, but there is a dark undercurrent running in the posts. I honestly stopped reading after a couple of posts. I don’t know why is there so much hate against Linux in this blog.
Am surprised by the negativity on the blog. I am no Linux expert and am more comfortable in Windows, but having used more of Ubuntu (9.04 and 9.10) over the last few weeks for my studies has made be appreciate some aspects even more. Is it perfect? Of course not, and nor is Windows or OS X or insert-your-favourite-OS-here. Maybe I should try and start a blog hater blog.
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