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

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:

I’ll try again later…

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

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

Kakashi was running very slowly, but I assumed it was due to all the installing and unistalling of different video capture programs. But after a couple of Windows restarts (which seems to work most times) nothing improved, and within some hours the computer was running reeeeeally slow.

So I decided to have a look at all the active processes and to stop every process I don’t really need. Finally, I turned down the Mcaffee Firewall and Kakashi went back to its normal speed. I never thougth it would be the firewall, but I’ve never had a firewall installed before. All the Mcaffee software came by default with the computer, with the registration for one year. But since I haven´t been able to register and it is slowing down the computer, I’ve decided to change the antivirus. I may try Avast, since it is free and some friends have recommended it for Windows systems.

.. Yes, I’ll definitelly give it a try!

I’ve been playing with our xbox thanks to VirtualDub. This program runs on Windows platforms and it is very light. It needs only around 1Mb of hard drive and doesn’t add that nasty lag. Moreover, it was very easy to configure, although having sound took a bit more time.

VirtualDub is specially designed for fast linear operations over video and includes a lot of different filters. I haven’t tried it much to take captures, but I managed to capture a short video very easily, though it occupies a lot of space. Now I want to learn more about, filtering, compressing and general video processing

Last friday, we finally received our new Dell! It’s name is Kakashi (although I’m pretty sure Andrés will call it Kikashi).

The technical features are:

• Dimension E521 AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200
• 1GB RAM
• NVidia GeForce 6150

I know it doesn’t sound very impressive but it serves our purposes: surfing the Internet, access to different SVN repositories, common desktop and web applications and…. playing the XBOX!!!

Our fantastic Kakashi comes with an analog TV Tuner specially for this goal. Unfortunately, Windows Media Center introduces a 2-3 seconds delay between the button pressing and the character moving. This delay can be ok for watching video, but it is unacceptable for playing! I’ll have to look for another capture video program