Doomed?

In a word, I am hugely impressed! I loathed WordPress 2.6.x and all it’s incarnations. It was a pain to navigate, clunky and just felt so delicate that I was afraid to even tweak my heavily modded K2 theme. Normally every WordPress upgrade ends up breaking my theme and I spend weeks re-writing sections of it. After the RC1 installation, much to my surprise everything was perfect and I cannot see anything out of place anywhere.

The new Administration panels are a joy to use and uncluttered, yet compact. Discussions are much easier to see at a glance on the dashboard thanks to the new comment features – you can now directly reply to a users comments and your comment will be updated in realtime beneath it. The whole overhaul is a breath of fresh air compared to version 2.6, which I regard as the poorest release of WordPress I have seen. I now await the full release on December 10th. Have that date on your calendar folks!

On a spanking Sunday morning at 08:55 I am currently listening to what could be the most relaxing track ever – Stir It Up, from Bob Marley & The Wailers Legend album. I had forgotten how sublime this album was.

Blood Test Woes

Recent life updates would most notably be visiting my doctor for the first time in 18 years to have my first ever Blood Test. I have a severe aversion to needles and even threatened my dentist at the age of 15 so suffice to say that I was shitting bricks. I am no stranger to knives or being stabbed but if you come at me with a needle, I’ll run a bloody mile whilst screaming like Carlton from Fresh Prince. The whole process went by really fast even though the doc was doing the procedure in my left arm, my right arm was clenched ready to let rip. My mother was there to keep an eye on me though! Sad yes, required? Hell yes.

Carphone Warehouse iPhone Woes

What else? A week after its release I am still trying to get a flamin iPhone. I seem to be blessed with living amongst retards in my home town. They seem to exist everywhere right now. I have only been with Carphone Warehouse for 13 months now and I never knew how crap an experience it was to get any sort of information from one of their employees in a store.

I played a blinder on Friday though. I had visited various CPW stores in my town over the week and came to the conclusion that they were only selling iPhones to new customers and not those wanting to upgrade to one. Sounds silly but bear with me here. For days I had been told that they wouldn’t be getting stocks for weeks now and they had computer problems. I can understand that…to an extent, just don’t play me for a fool here.

Me: I’d like to sign upto CPW for an iPhone and an 18month contract please if I may.
Salesman: Sure, if I can take your details, proof of address then I can <checks computer> yes get an iphone delivered to you on Monday. What colour would you like sir?
Me: Oh you have them in stock? In that case could I upgrade my other current contract to an iPhone, and then let my girlfriend know that you have stock?
Salesman: Er, let me just check if we can get you an iphone sir. Hmm, our allocation system isn’t quite working and won’t let me set you up with one.
Me: I can see the reflection of your screen in that cabinet behind you mate, I see either a figure of 400 or 500 on the screen.
Salesman: …but the system isn’t really working and I can’t order one for you.
Me: But you could when I wanted to sign up as a new customer?
Salesman: Sir if you could call the CPW Customer Helpline here they could possibly upgrade you…
Me: Right, cheers.

You could repeat the above about 4 times as I had repeatedly visited various CPW stores around my town. I had read of other CPW customers being in the same situation so I had an idea. Why not ring up their Helpline and say I wanted to ‘leave’. I am out of contract so why not? Mobile phone companies would do anything to keep a customer. To cut a long story short I phoned up and requested a PAC code (a code used to port your phone number to a new network), and they asked why I was leaving. I fed them the story and they right away asked what iPhone I wanted and what colour. So I now have 2 months free on a £35 month contract and an iPhone coming on Monday. Sweet!

WordPress 2.5 = A Whole Lot of Headache

Can I even give myself in to liking WordPress 2.5? I can’t stand the damn thing and no matter how much I use it, I just can’t get with the stupid admin screen! It is a mess! I am not the only person with these views it seems. WordPress development is progressing at such a rate that plugin/theme authors can barely keep up – this isn’t good. I’m still trying to sort out compatibility issues with Internet Exporer 5/6/7 and now WP2.6 is out!

Thieves/Expenses/CatCams

That thieving tart PR has stolen the theme I was going to move this blog to. This current K2 theme doesn’t feel as robust as it used to any more although I guess WordPress 2.5 is mostly to blame here. So theat tart who is too lazy to find a good theme for himself has stoled the one I was going to mod! Thieving Apple fanboy scum!

What else? Oh I have just spent £1200 on a bloody prayer ceremony at my house. This lasted over two days and really cheesed me off. I hate things like this and I’m not even flipping religious in the first place. It was mainly for the parents though so I can’t complain. Actually I can because I’m about to buy them a 42″ HDTV for a £1000 ffs.

What else? Oh Mr.Lee has his own CatCam! Ever wondered what your kitty cat gets up to when it leaves your house? Well Mr.Lee’s owner stuck a camera on his collar and the results are great!

Apple’s App Store arrives

Worra load of crock. Apple’s big iPhone launch as well as Firmware 2.0 launch has kinda backfired on them. Firmware 2.0 is an utter buggy pile of poo right now, with features such has widely reported high battery usage, repeated apps crashing, phones/touch’s automatically freezing etc. One list (here) just highlights even more stuff.

Luckily the App Store, accessible via iTunes and a small application on your device is rather good. I wish I could say the same for the quality of apps there because they are all rubbish aside from a few. Installer.app via Jailbreak has way better third party applications so far.

Twinkle: The Twitter client from Installer.app makes its way to the store with a bang. This is basically a location aware chat client that lets you leave twitters (140 character messages) to others in your area. It is a great idea that works so well.

Spinner Prologue: A maze game that makes use of the accelerometer present on the iPhone/Touch. Frantic, fun and you end up waving your device around like a llama.

Remote: Apple came up with this free masterpiece. It turns your device into a wifi remote allowing you to fully control iTunes on your computer, or even AppleTV. Doesn’t sound all that – until you try it that is. Eats up battery power though!

ZinTin: Now this is another location aware app. It allows you to exchange photos, share information with other users in your area. Every user has their own ‘wallspace’, which can contain your own photos as well as images from other users. A great idea that is strangely addictive.

]]> http://kainzy.org/2008/07/20/updates-rather-long/feed/ 8 http://kainzy.org/2008/05/11/weekend-mumblings/ http://kainzy.org/2008/05/11/weekend-mumblings/#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 20:29:47 +0000 Darren/Kain http://kainzy.org/?p=349

Kamikaze attack, a Wasp and WordPress

Man its hot out thar! Temperatures were hitting 28c outdoors and 30c in my room this weekend.

It was so damn hot that on Friday, a rather large fly decided to try and cool off by doing a kamikaze run straight into my left eye and completely knocked me out during a lunchtime walk by the side of the lake near my workplace. It was lodged in my upper eyeball and I could feel the bugger moving around but could I get it out?! Could I heck… I ended up walking home partially blinded, crashing in to random people as a result. I had to take a different route home too – it would be too embarrasing walking through Harrow town. Suffice to say that I eventually removed it, but fark me did that hurt!

On another note I was woken up on Saturday morning by a strange buzzing sound. It turned out to be a flaming suicidal wasp who preferred my cool pillow to the rather hot air. Needless to say this took me by complete surprise and saw me crash off the bed. A few hours later I was working under my desk rerouting some cables, and guess who I bumped in to down there? The blasted wasp was back and sent me fleeing to the nearest air freshner can. Coupled with a lighter it would be toast! Sadly the bugger had vanished by the time I had returned…

Sunday saw me writing a review for a new toy that I have, when I decided to take a break and upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.5.1 and the latest RC6 build of the superb K2 WordPress theme. WordPress installed smoothly enough but K2 RC6 has caused a few issues. WordPress 2.5.1 works slightly differently now and reads CSS in a different way so it took some getting used to. Currently this blog fails to render properly in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 – I can’t fix this without further investigation in to this issue. It is fine in Firefox, Safari and Opera as expected though. All this faffing about with WordPress meant that I failed to finish my review by Sunday night. Great I can’t even adjust to the new look dashboard…

I haven’t really written much on this blog lately so that is going to change from this point onwards. I’ll spend a lot more time tinkering around and adding new toys yay!

It’s that time of the month again

WordPress 2.5 arrived rather quietly overnight last night so it’s time to look into upgrading this blog again. For those who aren’t clued up on how big a upgrade this is take a look-see at the Screencast and the screenshots of the new dashboard interface.

A list of 2.5 compatibile plugins can be found Here. So next weekend I shall attempt to upgrade this blog, with possibly disastrous results. I may need to move to the latest K2 build at the same time I predict. Hoorah!

WordPress 2.3.1 and K2 RC3 up and runnin!

On a weekend where I was meant to be writing an Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect review for the 360, I’ve ended up doing other things instead. My horrible addiction to Mass Effect continues to make me lose focus of other things in life, and as a result I ended up playing it for 8 hours straight on Saturday night until 2am!

Today I was meant to finish at least one review but noooo, I ended up deciding to upgrade the blog. Now I initially avoided WordPress 2.3 because it had some major changes that I knew would break the blog, and it did. Infact, it almost completely destroyed it when I did a ‘test upgrade’ when 2.3 first arrived a month ago, as it buggered up all my tags and deleted all my categories. Obviously I had to take the plunge so I installed it today.

Naturally my tags went haywire, so that now involves me re-tagging every sodding post I’ve made. I have now just realised that my categories have also gone a bit nuts so I have to re-categorise every post. Aside from that, the latest K2 theme has knocked me sideways in terms of flexibility. I normally hand code my sidebars, but the one you see on the right has been done completely via K2′s drag and drop sidebar manager and is an exact replica (well almost) of my old one.

Bits of the blog will still be flaky and inactive as I start trawling through code I haven’t looked at in months. Now, back to work!

4+ hours of work and counting

I was expecting this. I took a day off today after literally getting pee’d on by the British weather as I walked ran to work yesterday morning. This morning I felt like hell as a result with a major headache since I was drenched silly from the mad downpour.

Anyway, I woke up this morning to find that WordPress 2.3 had been released. I was half dazed as I began to install this. I should know better than to install an upgrade to WordPress, without doing some research to see what problems others are having. In the past WordPress upgrades went ultra smoothly, however the team have recently begun adding features that most blogs rely on trusted plugins for. As a result those plugins get annoyed upon encountering an almost identical one and things go wrong.

I’m still not sure what has happened but my Extended Live Archives setup went totally wrong and threw a major wobbly, which resulted in me disabling the thing, then Ultimate Tag Warrior went a bit mental. The Archives page looks a bit poorly now as a result. Just when I thought I had everything under control I noticed that all my blog Categories had gone missing so now all my posts were filed under Misc! That is a colossal amount of posts that I have to now re-edit and re-assign categories to. Total time to correct all my posts = 5hrs.

For those fearing an upgrade, don’t. Most of the time WordPress upgrades are completely flawless. It depends entirely on how complex your blog is in regards to theme template, plugins and any hacks/tweaks you’ve done. I have made heaps of tweaks to various bits on the blog so I knew it wouldn’t be a smooth ride.

More Site Updates

Kainzy.org is back from a few days of downtime after moving to Vidahost.com. I’ve upgraded WordPress to the latest release (v2.1 codenamed Ella), and at the same time I’m fine tuning the latest version of the lovely K2 theme. Everything has gone extremely smoothly and I’ve only got just one mis-behaving plugin at the moment giving me some grief.

She cannae take anymore!

While I’ve been beavering away in the background of this blog fixing errors and minor bugs here and there, after upgrading the K2 theme, I can’t help but notice a colossal increase in traffic heading my way. These hits are definitely not coming from search engine bots as I’ve blocked most of the more annoying spider bots out there. Most of it seems to be coming from the Xbox 360 Reviews that I’ve been doing lately and I’m quite frankly stunned at the responses some of these reviews have had. I’d just like to say thank you.

The monthly hit rates for November hit 17,891, while October was 5,452. The previous record was 9,991 set in February 2006. The Gears of War review has attracted just over 3000 hits, and the 360 Wireless Headset write up has had 2800. Due to such a large increase in traffic (and I’ve not even started churning out the reviews yet) I can predict things will get a lot busier as I add more reviews. Guess I need to contact my good hosts JSW Freelance and upgrade my current package over the coming weeks. 17k of visitors may not sound much compared to most blogs out there, but for an average blog like this one it’s a lot in my opinion

I’ve also had a lot of emails from readers asking why they can’t comment on my reviews. Well here’s the answer to that – I’m not exactly sure. The K2 theme as I understand it supports Page Comments, and I have ‘Allow Comments’ ticked on the pages I write my reviews on, so I don’t understand why commenting just doesn’t work. I’ve looked at the code and it seems fine too. I am looking into this though but I doubt I can fix it, as it is well beyond me. For now, your best bet is to post a comment on the main review related snippet I’ll post whenever I upload a couple of games reviews.

Nowt broken yet

I’ve received my Xbox 360 Wireless Headset earlier today, so I’ve done a quick review of that. You can find it in the reviews section. I’ve also upgraded the K2 theme for this blog. It’s taken me a good month or so of tweaking before I could bring it online, so some portions of this blog will still be missing, or dead. Lastly, I’ve re-enabled the Rolling archives feature, so you can seamlessly navigate through the older pages of this blog. Bear in mind that it’s a bit flaky, and doesn’t like the Opera browser one bit (not my fault!), it should work fine in Firefox and IE6/7. Please give me a shout if anything isn’t looking quite right. Ta!