Mostly about my amusement
After speaking with my friend, I’m going to buy the Pearl from him.
The geek appeal is too much. I get delivery of my own email, I get Yahoo Mail, GMail, and now thanks to MidpSSH I get a working ssh client on my cell phone. I doubt that I’ll do anything very interactive via ssh on my cell phone, but I can reboot to my heart’s content.
Now how cool is that?
The WordPress installation on my primary server has gone spa; dunno why yet. I’ve switched over to the VPS with WP-Cache running so it should perform well. Yay for automated backups.
I have been thinking about getting a new cell phone/PDA for a while. When I mentioned to Lily the idea she said “get the iPhone when it comes out”.
I really like the way she thinks.
I mentioned this to my friend and he suggested I try out his BlackBerry Pearl. He got it a while back and became disenchanted with the whole connected-all-the-time thing and has recently gone back to using his Motorola Razr v3. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and the novelty has not worn off yet.
I signed up for Cingular’s $30/month unlimited data plan. They still charge per message but for surfing and other apps that’s fine.
First thing is the size. It’s small enough that it can fit in my pocket and fits in my hand comfortably. The smaller keyboard took some getting used to but I just type and let the SureType software do it’s thing. It usually gets the words right and I rarely have to correct anything. The size is good and if all PDA’s were this size the world would be a happier place.
Setting up e-mail was interesting. I run my own domain and mail servers. I do not run POP3 or IMAP in the clear; I only use the SSL based versions because I have a real dislike for putting my password in the clear on the Internet. I was concerned that the service would not be able to handle my server because of this.
It was not a problem at all. I gave the system my e-mail address and it was able to do a POP3S connection and get my mail. It was very seamless. When I receive mail it’s because the Blackberry server polled my mail box. When I send mail, it just uses my from address and sends from it’s server. For this reason I turned off SPF in case I actually sent someone an e-mail who checks. From my server logs I can see that hardly anyone is using the SPF records so no big loss.
I have Vista so I went to RIM’s web site to get the latest copies of their software. It ended updating the phone to the current firmware release and I am able to sync up with Outlook 2007. I only use Outlook for managing contacts.
Downloading software to the BlackBerry Pearl was easy and the first one I got was the trial IM+ software. It’s a good instant message client that supports more IM services than I use. It runs in the background and is pretty straight forward. Then I got the GMail client, Google Maps, and some other ones.
The phone experience was good too and I was able to pair with my Bluetooth devices with no problem. I have to get the knack for using the address book but the quality of the sound was okay (for a phone).
It’s also a MP3 player but I have an iPod which I use so I don’t expect to get much mileage out of it.
If I can use it for my personal mail and IM then I’ll be satisfied.
WordPress 2.2 is out and has at least one really useful feature that I’ve already used.
I backup my blog software and database on a nightly schedule. The whole works, database and files gets copied to my backup server on a VPS.
Testing the backup is a pain since the database points to the real URL and hostname. Now with 2.2 you can override the site url and wordpress home with these two lines in your wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://www.sample.com/wordpress’);
define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://www.sample.com’);
I created a new backup and restored it on my VPS server. I made that change to the wp-config.php file to point to the name and location of the backup server. Now all the links and administration work fine referencing the real hostname.
See http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.2 for more information. This feature lets you test your database on another server and play around without impacting your real blog.
I am a big user of freely available software. Here is a short list of what I use.
Thunderbird 2.0 now integrates with Vista. I like it because it’s a full fledged email client. In order to use it with web mail, you need to turn on POP3 with the mail provider. Google Mail supports this but with Yahoo and Hotmail you need to shell out some dollars.
With the Webmail extension for Thunderbird you can treat Yahoo, Hotmail, and a bunch of others as if they were a POP3 mailbox. The extension listens on localhost on a port that you can decide (defaults are POP3 at 110, SMTP at 25, and and IMAP at 143) and receives e-mail from the site for you. Thunderbird then connects to localhost to get the POP3 mail.
On my Vista system I could not use the port defaults. It’s probably due to Vista goofiness or the personal firewall software I use. I first installed the Webmail extension and changed the defaults to 8110 and 8025. Here is what the options dialog box looked like.
After that I installed the additional Yahoo and Hotmail extensions and configured them both for the BETA website versions. With the Web Mail extension installed in Thunderbird 2.0 you can now add Webmail accounts. These accounts are just POP3 mail accounts that happen to speak to localhost. I changed the account names to make them shorter. If all goes well you should have something like this added to your folders list.
This also works in Thunderbird 1.5 (I tried it on my Ubuntu laptop) except 1.5 puts all the mail into one local folder. In the current version each account gets its own inbox.
Thanks to this extension I can now use Yahoo and Hotmail email with Thunderbird without setting up (read as: pay for) POP3 access. This is a neat solution and provides a shim to make web based email accessible via more common interfaces such as POP3.
Last Update: Oh good grief. Pidgin spell check works fine and it was an aspell issue all along. The file aspell.exe needs to be in your PATH.
Install Pidgin 2.2.2 and make sure you install the language you need. That will kick off Aspell and the dictionary. Once the installation is done go to the control panel. In Vista it’s “System and Mantenance” then click on Advanced system settings.
Click on Environment Variables and modify the Path environment variable. BE CAREFUL not to mess up that settings as it could do bad things to your system.
When you edit the PATH variable, append to the end of it with a semicolon the path of your aspell.exe. On my system I added to the end “;C:Program Files (x86)Aspellbin”.
That’s all there is to it.
This is probably documented somewhere but hey as long as it works…
Update: Spell check for Pidgin 2.2.2 (current as I type this) does not work on my installation. I believe the problem is that pidgin is looking for Aspellbin in the wrong directory but that’s just a guess on my part. If I can get it to work on my Vista 64 installation and reproduce it, I’ll post it here.
In order to get the Windows version of Pidgin spell check working, go to http://aspell.net/win32/ and get the full installer as well as the pre-compiled dictionary.
It’s released, get Pidgin 2.0.0 here.
WordPress themes are usually either XHTML 1.0 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Strict. The first line of the generated web page has the Document Type Definition (DTD) sent to the browser to define which.
My main theme that I use FastTrack, was defined as transitional. Just for kicks I changed it to strict and figured I would use the W3C validation service to identify what needed to be changed to make it validate.
I did not have to change much. The built in TinyMCE editor produces img tags that are not XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. For example an image will have the tag defined as
<img src=”http://blog.dembowski.net/wp-content/costco-harmony-720.jpg” title=”Logitech Harmony 720″ alt=”Logitech Harmony 720″ align=”right” hspace=”5″ vspace=”5″ />
The attributes align, hspace, and vspace are valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional but not strict.
In order to make it valid for strict I had to lose those attributes. In strict this is valid:
<img src=”http://blog.dembowski.net/wp-content/costco-harmony-720.jpg” style=”margin: 5px; float: right” title=”Logitech Harmony 720″ alt=”Logitech Harmony 720″ />
The align attribute is not valid for <p> tag either, this requires another replacement with a style= statement.
In the theme I replaced one that was using <p align=”center”> with <p style=”text-align: center”>.
The last thing was to change strike through and underline. I used to put in the post via the code tab <strike>text</strike> which is not valid in strict. Neither is <u>underline</u>. I replaced that with <del>text</del> to have a line through the text and <ins>text</ins> to get underline.
I’m not particularly concerned about XHTML compliance. This and playing with CSS entries is just part of my learning and understanding how this all works.
I’ve been using Trillian 3 Pro since it came out. It’s okay but I have problems with it’s stability and I suspect that AOL updated their protocol and Trillian has not kept up. Upgrading to Vista did not help, Trillian routinely crashes and I can’t get any spell check plug-in to work.
The appeal of Trillian is that instead of running multiple clients which are loaded with advertisements (I am a huge user of AdBlock Plus) I get to run an IM client that supports all those protocols and it has no ads.
The free IM client GAIM Pidgin is that way too except it really has kept up with the protocols. The current version 2.0.0 beta 7 runs well in Vista and looks good. I’m using it now for AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk. AFAIK it does not support the whiz bang features of video and voice. Since I don’t use those features anyway I’m not missing out.
The first thing the beta does is update my GTK+ installation. Good thing since the existing installation worked badly in Vista. I ran the defaults and installed Aspell also. The spell checker does the red squiggly line underneath words I misspell; important to me since I hate when people use “r u there” or “c u l8r”.
I know it’s instant messaging but do people have to kill the language that way…?
Pidgin comes with sounds for events such as when contacts log on or off, when a message is recieved or sent, etc. It supports plug-ins for things like setting window transparency, conversation color, iconify on away, and so on.
It’s all well thought out from a development that has been going on for months (not counting the issue with AOL and re-branding the product) and is a really good replacement for Yahoo, AOL, and Micosoft’s IM clients. When 2.0.0 is released in a week or two I’ll dump Trillian 3 Pro and just use Pidgin.
Right after I put a post up about how dd-wrt rocks, I bricked my WRT54G v5 by playing around with the nvram settings. “It’s dead, it’s a late WRT54g, it’s passed on.”
Sigh.
Right now I have my buggy WET54GS5 back and running on the second floor. I’ll either shell out $60 for a WRT54GL or I’ll wait for draft-n to settle down and put dd-wrt on that. I’ll need a pair of them, one for the basement and one for the second floor… that could get expensive…
