Dave’s Happy Place

So I had this really strange problem with my new mobile phone. It takes a micro SD card for data storage and I bought a Kingston 1Gb card when I bought the phone. As far as the phone was aware there was a memory card installed because it showed the pretty icon on the main screen. However, whenever I tried to access any of the Memory Card storage area the phone would just beep with a "Not Allowed" error message displayed on the phone.

Very weird. Did some searching and found some luck in the D900 Memory Card help forum at http://www.expansys.com. One of the posts mentioned that giving the card a volume label worked. I thought to myself surely not, that’s just a little too obscure. So I checked my card in the laptop and sure enough there was no volume label. I gave the card one and then it worked.

Now that is some weird ass behaviour. I wouldn’t of ever thought of doing that in order to try and solve the problem. Nice one Samsung!

Plug-ins are great, they allow feature introduction into software that the original authors didn’t dream of at the time. This commonly approached solution to preventing feature creep in the core of the product has some flaws though. When the orginal authors of the software don’t know what sorts of functionality people will want introduce they inherently have no way of knowing what hooks they need to provide plugin authors. They can’t design what they don’t know - it’s just impossible. There is somewhat of a solution though, create hooks so they plug-in authors can do anything they like! Of course, this is bad as well…

I’m desperately trying to use Wordpress at the moment for blog and page management as I try and convert my existing hand-cranked XHTML web-site to something more manageable. I really want it to work because I like the fact that I can find plugins that do cool things with the content, that I can download new themes, that all the content is in a database and so on. I really want this to work because every time I want to change the look of the existing (albeit sparse) content it’s painfully time consuming.

However, Wordpress has literally had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of plug-ins built for it. And that’s where the wonder of plug-ins starts to tarnish. There are soooo many plug-ins that I have no idea where to find the good ones to fix the problems that I’m currently experiencing. In many cases someone has started a plug-in, someone else has added something cool to it and now I don’t know which one to use. And worse, once I’ve installed the plug-in how will I know when a bug has been fixed or new feature has been developed? Unfortunately it seems that the plug-in management for Wordpress is limited to hoping that the person installing the plugin has unzipped the plug-in into the correct location and activated it. I’ve got around 20 plug-ins in my list at the moment, some months and months old and I have no idea if any of them are the latest version and whether or not there are any updates to them.

The biggest problem I’ve got at the moment is that the default editor in Wordpress is not overly useful. It’s falling over in many ways trying to get my existing content into blog posts. Especially around image and page linking. And, it seems like there isn’t any good way for a plug-in developer to hook into the editing phase (I would have thought a rather significant phase) to allow the user be perform useful things. I mean, how many hoops should the user have to jump through to reference another post in the same blog?

Plug-in authors seem to be able to do all sorts of whizzbang things when it comes to churning out cool HTML and JavaScript AJAX type stuff but can’t seem to make it easier for a user to write useful content. The user should be able to click on a button to reference an existing post but it doesn’t seem like this is possible because none of the post linking plug-ins have offered this as a solution.

What a freakin’ nightmare trying to get bluetooth to work on my HP laptop so I can get my new cellphone to talk to it via bluetooth.

To start with I couldn’t see any bluetooth devices entry in the Control Panel despite Windows Help telling me that’s where I had to go in order to configure it. After searching on the internet it seems like this is a common problem in Windows XP SP2. If Windows doesn’t find a somehow certified bluetooth device driver then it simply doesn’t show all of the Bluetooth related information in the Control Panel.

After finding that the Control Panel applet is run using bthprops.cpl I thought I could just use that directly. However, running bthprops.cpl didn’t actually do anything. So after more searching on the internet, there were more people found with similar problems of having the Bluetooth Control Panel applet simply not doing anything. Some people uninstalled the original bluetooth drivers and then had Windows install the new drivers and everything worked. Not for me though, unfortunately. Even updating the driver through the Device Manager didn’t seem to do anything because Windows Update couldn’t find any more up-to-date drivers.

Anyway, it’s all working fine now after I went to HP to explicitely download the latest drivers from Support Software for Bluetooth by HP. 20 odd Mb to download though, but at least the problem has gone away. Hooray!

If you are having problems with bluetooth not showing up in the Windows Control Panel then I suggest trying to download the latest drivers for your bluetooth device to ensure they are compatible with Windows XP SP2.

Wohoo, I’ve finally found an editor for WordPress that doesn’t scramble handwritten HTML. I’ve been trying to get some Google Gadgets and Picasa Web Album links working in posts, and the standard editor for Wordpress would scramble both cases - even when using HTML mode. Very frustrating.

The FCK editor (no not the naught word f*** but rather the unfortunate initials of the author) as part of the ChenPress plugin to WordPress seems to work a charm.

I can now happily cut and paste the HTML source from either Google Gadgets or my Picasa Web Album’s and not have to magically rejig when I click save.

Yes, the famed Magic 8-ball lives as a Google Gadget.

This was the better of the two Magic 8-Ball gadgets that I found at Google.