It’s been a while
Well, here we are in a brand new year – and a brand new decade. And I thought it was only right that (after such a long silence) I at least wish you Happy New Year.
Right, that’s that out of the way!
Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? I don’t normally, and I’m not planning to start now, but I’m going to make you a not-in-any-way-legally-binding promise that I will try to put something new here every week. I do miss writing the odd rant or software review, so I’m going to get back in the habit.
My excuse for not writing much lately is that I’ve given up my geek-centric ‘life’ in exchange for an actual proper life and so I’ve not had the inclination or time to spend hours sitting in front of my computer. I’ve discovered that it’s much better to be outside, interacting with people. Imagine that! Who’d've thought it?
But, because I’m amazingly lucky and have a very understanding other half, I’ve been given a great excuse for getting back to the geeking – at least on a part-time basis. Christmas saw a gift of a Mac Box Set (Snow Leopard, iLife ‘09, iWork ‘09) so I’ve been spending time getting used to the new OS and updating the software I use. That process has today brought me back to my blogging client and – finding that it seems to no longer be supported and is not bug-free on SL – I’m trying out others (I’m writing this in a trial version of MarsEdit).
Anyone else out there using Snow Leopard? What are the good and bad points? What new features should I be most excited about (I’ve moved from Tiger, so I hope there are quite a few new things I haven’t found yet). Drop me a comment and let me know.
Spam and comments
Back in November, I wrote about how, since the beginning of October, I’d been receiving a hugely increased amount of spam comments. You’ll be pleased to know that this has continued, and I’m today running at 32,373 spam comments – up from 3,000 at the beginning of October.
That averages out somewhere between 250 and 300 spam comments a day, which means that I’m no longer checking my Defensio quarantine for legitimate comments that have slipped through the net; I’m not spending time wading through adverts for strange sexual practices or cheap prescription meds just to find that there aren’t any real comments in there anyway. So, if you have written a real comment since the beginning of October and it hasn’t appeared on the blog, submit the comment again and then use the contact form to tell me about it, and I’ll keep an eye out for it.
Actually, it’s probably a good time to just recap the comments policy for The New Wolfs Howl, so that we all know where we are:
All new commenters are moderated: in other words, if you haven’t commented before, your comment will be held for administrator (me, in other words) approval. Once approved, all future comments you make with the same name and email address will be automatically approved.
Anonymous comments are not allowed: you must enter a name (it doesn’t have to be your real name, it can be your internet name) and email address. This is to try and keep the trolls out.
Be nice: you don’t have to agree with me or anyone else that comments on a post, but let’s not resort to silly name calling, shall we?
Finally, please note that – even if automatically approved – I do reserve the right not to publish your comment. Should that occasion arise (it never has so far), I’ll email you and let you know why and perhaps ask you to re-submit your comment in a re-worded form.
And I think that’s it.
Getting my geek on
Regular readers will have noticed that there’s been a distinct lack of posts over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been busy wasting my time playing about with all sorts of techy stuff, and it has been great!
First off, I’ve started playing about with virtual machines on my iMac. In case you don’t know, a virtual machine is way of running another operating system in a separate window, with no need to partition your drive, re-boot, etc. For the Mac, the market leaders are Parallels and VMware Fusion but I’ve been using an open source alternative called VirtualBox.
The ease of use means that setting up a virtual machine is a question of a few clicks of a mouse and then finding the install disk for the guest operating system. Once it has loaded, you’ve got a fully functioning Windows (or LInux or whatever) machine that’s accessible from your normal desktop.
There’s also a variation on this theme called CrossOver, which allows you to create what it calls bottles to run individual programs without needing to install the whole operating system. So, for instance, I can run Internet Explorer 6 to test web pages or Word to edit documents but without the Windows desktop environment.
Neither of these ways of running Windows programs gives you the full Windows experience – virtual drivers can only do so much – but if you have an occasional need to run a Windows program, they’re an excellent way to give yourself the option.
For instance, I was doing some work on a website the other day and was able to test it on FireFox 2.0 and 3.0, Opera, Flock, Safari, IE6, IE7 and IE8 on three different operating systems using just one lot of hardware.
So what are my three operating systems? OS X, Windows XP and (fanfare please) Windows 7. I’ve never had the chance to really play about with Vista, so have no idea whether it’s as bad as people say (the brief use I have had, it seems fine to me) but so far I’m loving Windows 7. The problem is, I don’t know what is new to Windows 7 and what is already available in Vista.
I can’t test some of the more advanced graphical stuff – like the Aero interface – because the virtual machine does not support it, but I am quite liking the Windows 7 desktop experience. It’s crisp and clean, easily readable and uncluttered. In many ways, I’d say that Windows and OS X are moving closer together in the way that they present themselves to the user; for me, as someone who prefers to use OS X but has to use Windows at work, I think this is a good thing.
I like the changes to the Windows Explorer, presenting me with the information I need and hiding away the stuff I’m not interested in; I like the new Start menu; I like the fact that the whole system seems more security conscious.
Some of the things I’m used to using in Windows seem to have been moved about, particularly in Control Panel, but still seem to be there. So far, all the software I’ve tried to install seems to have worked fine. I haven’t yet found anything that is too annoying to live with, which seems to be a major step forward for Microsoft.
Over the next few days, I’m going to carry on geeking out with Windows 7 and I’ll let you know if it all goes terribly wrong!
Brief notes
Just a couple of items to highlight for you, in my ongoing series of things that don’t warrant a whole post to themselves.
1. As you can’t have failed to notice, Apple have announced today at MacWorld that iTunes is going DRM free. No longer will music purchased through the iTunes store be restricted-use; you’ll be able to do what you like with it – just like you can with downloads from Amazon.
The problem comes in that any music you’ve already purchased (unless it was an iTunes Plus track) will still have DRM attached, and if you want to upgrade it – which you may have to, if the DRM servers get switched off, because it seems that will make your music non-functional – you’ll have to pay some more money for the privilege. Not the full cost, but 20p per music track.
That doesn’t sound like much, but if you’ve bought a lot of tracks it could soon add up. It would have been better if Apple and the record labels could have found it in their hearts to let you upgrade for free. Especially seeing as how by the end of March, all iTunes tracks are planned to be DRM free.
2. Something else you’ve probably seen over the last few days is the announcement of the new Doctor Who, to replace David Tennant from 2010 onwards. Matt Smith has apparently had quite an illustrious theatre career and has been in a few TV things (many of them with Billie Piper) but for me, he’s a complete unknown. Not sure if he’s a good choice or not.
Of course, my preference would have been for the return of Tom Baker.
Comments no longer broken
Update 4: the latest build of beta 3 seems to have fixed the issue. The comment-template.php file is no longer the same as it was in the version that didn’t work – the reference to htmlspecialchars_decode() has been removed. All seems to be fine, and we’re back on the cutting edge!
Update 3: not sure how sound an idea this is, but I’ve now re-loaded beta 3, but with the comment-template.php from beta 2. It seems to accept comments, and I haven’t found anything else broken so far, so we’ll see what happens.
Update 2: the culprit file – comment-template.php – seems to have changed quite extensively from beta 2 to beta 3. Beta 2 does not give the same error, so that’s what is currently powering The New Wolfs Howl comments. I’m loathe to give up the much improved dashboard of 2.7 and return to 2.6.3, so I’m gonna go back to beta 2 for a while.
Update: well, couldn’t work out what exactly was causing the problem but looks like it was something to do with WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 because now that I’ve gone back to 2.6.3 the problem has gone away.
It may not be the beta software itself that is causing the issue; it could be an incompatible plug-in or theme but I wasn’t able to find an obvious culprit during my testing, so I’m putting it down to the beta curse!
Original: Thanks to Gareth for notifying me of this.
If you try to comment on any posts, you’ll probably get the following error (or one very like it):
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: htmlspecialchars_decode() in /home/wolfieb/public_html/wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 802
Your comment will still be submitted, though, and if you refresh the page everything should go back to normal. I’m currently looking into the issue and it’s probably either a problem with the beta version of Wordpress that I’m using, or it’s an issue with my theme not liking the the beta software.
I’ll keep this post updated with changes as they occur.
Wolfs Helpers
