Archive for September, 2007

Upgrade to Wordpress 2.3

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

Dexter has not been such a piece of cake as version 2.2.3 but it’s finally on. The problems I had were caused by one of the new features: canonical URLs. Basically, what it does is to make sure that no matter how you access certain content you’ll always get the same URL, making it stay in the address bar. This URL is the canonical URL and it is the only way to represent a content. For example, while accessing this blog, you can type www.aracelicheca.com/blog or just aracelicheca.com/blog. Both ways work but only one can be the canonical URL.

But sometimes this redirection to the canonical URL may conflict with your own redirections, usually defined in the .htaccess file (Apache), and in previous revisions there were problems with host name capitalization. There are some other causes which will lead you to this Firefox error:

The page isn’t redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies.

This bug was reported and it is listed as fixed in Wordpress Trac (Ticket #4773), but for some reason it is not working for me. For the time being, I’ve made a quick fix consisting of disabling canonical URLS by commenting the last line in wp-admin/canonical.php. I know, it is not a fix at all but just avoiding the problem ;) I’ll do some research and I hope I’ll be able to enable this feature again. If you have any ideas, just let me know :)

Ooops…. Wordpress 2.3 not so easy…

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

Complete failure upgrading to Wordpress 2.3, so I had to go back to 2.2.3. At least I had the backups from a couple of hours before.. I had problems with:

  • MySQL backups: problems with quotes, < and >, etc. So funny, because I just did the backup with one tool and I used the same tool to import it… Anyway, I managed to recover the backup
  • Redirecting urls. This was the original problem. The upgrade seemed to be ok, but when I accessed the blog I saw the following img:

Wordpress failure

I’ll try again later…

Book: Amulet of Samarkand

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

Amulet of SamarkandI bought this book in an airport and I thought it was the typical bestseller that would keep me entertained during the flight and little more. And I was quite surprised when I found myself wanting to read more and more.

The book tells us the story of Nathaniel and his summoning of a very powerful djinn, Bartimeus. Nathaniel is a young wizard, very yound and unexperienced, and Bartimeus is one of the most powerful beings, very old and with tons of experience. It is very difficult for Nathaniel to control such a strong djinn, but it must be done in order to achieve his goal…

I found the story very interesting and I liked the way it is told, by jumping from Nathaniel’s perspective to Bartimeus’. I recommend this book, specially to all fantasy readers and as for me, I’m going to buy the second and third book ;)

Upgrade to Wordpress 2.2.3

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

I should have done it ages ago but I felt very lazy… It was my first upgrade and I was afraid I would lose all data, etc. So easy to make a backup… just back up the database and the custom theme. That was all I needed :D

But I was not letting laziness beat me and here we are! Wordpress 2.2.3! 5 minutes for the backups, 5 minutes to upgrade my local copy and 5 minutes to upgrade the real blog..

So 15 minutes in total and I feel much more prepared to start blogging regularly. This has been my first step ;)

“No news…

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

is good news”. So they say and so I want to believe. I don’t have any news concerning my conversion process to a Googler :(

I was expecting to know whether I had the offer or not last Friday, 7th of August, but for the day being nobody has contacted me. I’ll try to find out what is going on and I hope the decission does not take long, because I was supposed to start working the 24th :D

I’ll keep you informed…

Back from Scotland

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

I’m back from Scotland. It’s been a great week, visiting many towns and the countryside, conquering castles and even watching the penguin parade in Edinburgh Zoo!!

It’s been a year since I left Spain and it’s the first time I’ve been anywhere in UK outside London. Weather has been nice, much warmer than I expected and it hasn’t almost rained. Unbelievable for Scotland… but better for the tourists :D

I’ll tell you more about it, but I leave you with some pictures for the moment.

Edinburgh Castle

Dunkeld Cathedral

Caerlaverock Castle

Loch Lochy

Scotland

Scotland

Edinburgh Zoo - penguin parade

Holidays!!

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Finally!! See you in a week ;)