Pewr WordPress BLG

1. iPhone Design Philosophy revisited:  may take your breath away with hidden features explored after long time of use.

Tricky combo key-shortcuts:  Double-click Home button (ping-pong style) will activate iPod, do it again will hide iPod

Holding Home button and Sleep button together long enough will force restart iPhone. (this is especially useful when no other methods work if your iPhone crashes.

One slide (slide right) to delete email feature, slide left to cancel the action.

2. Jailbreak iPhone using ziPhone on either Windows or Mac.

Tons of free apps/games to install, default installer works just fine, if it’s not satisfying enough, get Cydia Package Manager…

And of course you should try SummerBoard, which is one step further than the default Springboard theme manager… I’m running China Band theme, it’s crazy cool…

And guess what, now my iPhone is just as powerful as my Macbook running with Leopar… File Manager(Finder), Word/PDF/XLS, Terminal, System Monitor, Dicts, turning Mac into a Flashlight, Zoom-able camera, Voice/video recorder, MMS feature… almost all shortcomings I mentioned in the 1st review have been rectified… that’s just fantastic… Of course for travelers that who don’t want to pay hefty int’l roaming chrages, you can also jailbreak and change IMEI (SIM#) to use a local wireless provider’s SIM… I’m ready for my next trip to China now… LOL…

BTW, did I mention that ziPhone has been downloaded more than 4mil times? That’s incredible…not hard to imagine that at least 30-40% folks who have iphone have jailbroken it and among which there is a % of people must not use it on the AT&T networks… consider that Apple takes 6 bucks out of the $20 unlimited data service per month, both ATT and Apple have lost quite a lump sum for not being able to hold these users within the ATT network… time to short Apple a bit… target price 120 again…

First Impression: It’s so kiddy & rugged design, especially the twin-latches on the sides of the “laptop” device.

Network setup: There is no RJ-45 interface, so wireless has come to rescue if you don’t want to use USB-to-wireless adapter… Okay, the keyword is: wireless, then what about security support, WPA? Yes and No and the biggest bummer is here, for an average Joe, it’s probably quite frustrating to get WPA passphrase setup here, why?

For example, if I have WPA key as: Ricky8un, OLPC won’t take that simple key, instead it HAS TO BE a passphrase, this is insanely stupid and unthoughtful (more details next):

wpa_passphrase "name-of-your-AP" "Ricky8un" 

And you can generate the passphrase on the terminal without a problem but you can NOT copy it directly, so, you have to open the passphrase TXT file in the browser then copy(Ctrl-C) and paste(Ctrl-V) again to the Mesh Network window/console… this is extremely inconvenient and if you say it asks for a genius kid to set it up, I will not object it.

There are bunch of other apps for pure educational purposes and I found less interesting, and the keyboard design must be for water-proofing and very bad in terms of responsiveness and I found it more difficult than Asus EeePC…

For $175, it is cheap, but it’s SLOW and takes some get-used-to, would I love to get one? No way, ever? No… No… No…

well, simple:

You will most likely need g++ (C++) and various other build tools, Ubuntu has prepared a jumbo package called: build-essential.

All you need to do is this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

That’s it….

Also, to search for any package:

sudo apt-cache search some-package

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Okay, as of 8/24/2007, phpBB3 RC5 is released,

I’ll simply post my system configurations then followed by all potential areas that you may run into problems during the installation & configuration of phpBB3.

OS:  Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 or FreeBSD 6.2

WebServer:  Apache2.2 or Lighttpd 1.4+

PHP:             PHP5 with php-cgi (fastcgi)

PHP Extensions: ftp, gd, xml, mysql/mysqi and more.

Mysql 5.x

STEPS:

1. Download src from phpbb.com

2. make uncompressed phpBB3 source accessible from the web

for my case, I symbolic linked to /var/www/phpBB3 (on Ubuntu+Lighttpd), FreeBSD will be /usr/local/www/data/phpBB3 if you used defaults from day 1.

3. Prepare mysql database: phpbb3

mysqladmin -u root -p create phpbb3

4. http://localhost/phpBB3/install/index.php

Follow the guided steps and the last step would be to manually download config.php and put it(override) as ~phpBB3/config.php

5. Now, you are about ready to rock and roll, access the following 2 links

For general browsing: http://localhost/phpBB3/

For Admin console: http://localhost/phpBB3/adm/

Other notes

Ubuntu’s Lighttpd support is wrecked, I personally prefer FreeBSD’s hardcore access, that’s not using lighty-mod-enable/disable bullsh*, instead, edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf directly to enable mod_fastcgi and add a fastcgi section as well, an exemplary setup here:

213 #### fastcgi module
214 ## read fastcgi.txt for more info
215 fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
216                            ( "localhost" =>
217                            (
218                           "socket" => "/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket",
219                           "bin-path" => "/usr/local/bin/php-cgi"
220                            )
221                            )
222                          )

I have been looking for detailed & complete instructions concerning integrating wordpress into existing web site and pages.
Finally I came up with my own solution, prerequisites to list here before we take the dive.

PREREQUISITES

1. a fully functional web server, database and WordPress 2.x release

2. an existing web site and array of pages to integrate WP with.

3. I assumed that you have adequate (well just basics) knowledge on: HTML, CSS, PHP and are not afraid of making mistakes maybe?

STEPS TO TAKE

1. Create you own theme: Start with a theme of your choice and make it in sync with your existing web site.Let’s pick the default one under: ~wordpress/wp-content/themes/default

cp -a default test_new

Either replace test_new/style.css with the CSS you used with your existing web site OR hammering out this style.css and make the fonts/color-tone et al in sync with existing CSS. This could be a very time consuming process (more details in a separate blog-post of itself maybe)

2. Modify necessary set of files under ~test_new/
Here are the brief list (minimal) files to change:

header.php         # very beginning of the HTML raw content including header
headernav.php   # header Navigation portion
page.php            # page content
footer.php           # footer and closing tags.

Please note that you probably want to install Firefox Firebug extension for client-side debugging to expedite the integration of WP 2.x into your existing site, it will help you pin-point the bugs more quickly and precisely.

Sometimes, you probably need to furnish your style.css extensively to make it fit with WP 2.x and also keep it in sync with your site in terms of color-tones, fonts, especailly the header-nav (you do use header nav in your site, don’t you, otherwise, the “integration” is less painful…)

3. Done, we are done here, right?

Other Notes

a. Regarding style.css …

84 div#header ul#top-nav {
85     width: 784px;
86     height: 91px;
87     background: transparent url(images/bg-tabs.png) no-repeat;
88     margin: 20px 0px 0px 0px;
89     padding: 0px 20px;
90     list-style: none;
91     color: #000;
92     font-weight: bold;
93     font-size: smaller;
94 }

ThinkFree a new contender in Web Documentations …

Facts: There is NO chkconfig on Ubuntu or any Debian variants.

On FreeBSD, we have /etc/rc.conf as a one-stop-for-all place for services management.

Ubuntu utilizes /etc/default/ to indicate what daemon/service to start or not-start during startup.

i.e.:

cat /etc/default/apache2

NO_START=0 or 1

startup = 1 or 0

It’s quite self-explanatory.

And the real service/daemon start/stop script is located under /etc/init.d/apache2