For those of you who, like myself, are just now boiling eggs for Easter, here’s what I use… There’s a trick I saw on Emeril Live a long time ago that has always given me done and easy to peel eggs that aren’t green in the middle.

The “Lucky 13″ Boiled Egg

1. Put the eggs in a pot of cool water over high heat. Bring them to a boil and let them boil for 2 minutes.
2. Take them off the heat and cover for 11 minutes.
3. Put them in an ice bath or some really cold water. (If you don’t use ice, you’ll need to change your water a few times while they cool.)

Voila, the perfect boiled egg using Emeril’s “Lucky 13″ method.

Well, I finally figured it out. It appears that the OpenID plugin is not compatible with the Contact Form ][ plugin I was using.

It's always worked great with registration and stuff, but never worked for me to use it as my OpenID server. I had figured it had something to do with me not having curl support built into PHP.

I just figured I'd check the error log today, right after I tried it again, and saw a lot of errors with various plugins. Well, I don't know if I can live without all those plugins, but let's deactivate them and see if it works. Wow, it worked...

After activating them again one at a time, I found it was Contact Form ][ that was causing the problems. Great, I went and found a different contact form plugin, Contact Form 7, and it is working great, as is OpenID.

I was just reading through the April issue of Website Magazine and found an article about Dofollow Blogs. I wasn’t aware of it, but most blogs add a rel="nofollow" attribute to links inside comments. I checked this blog, and lo and behold, it did the same thing. I didn’t like that at all, link love is one of the few benefits you get for reading and commenting on blogs. So, I immediately went to work to fix this.

The first solution I found was a plugin (more like 10 of them). I was scanning through them to find one that would definitely work with Wordpress 7.1 and stumbled across an article on Perishable Press that explained how to do it without a plugin.

So I SSH into my server and find that the file mentioned in the article doesn’t exist in this version. Hmm, this article was written in 2007, I imagine Wordpress has changed some since then. So, I take a guess at which file might hide the functions with the offending nofollow… and what do you know? I found it my first try.

So anyway, here’s the good stuff you’ve been waiting for. To make your Wordpress 2.7.1 blog DoFollow just edit the file wp-includes/comment-template.php line 148:

From:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

To:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external' class='url'>$author</a>";

Basically, take out the nofollow and preceding space.

To future commenters (and past commenters), you now get some link love. Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment.

Imprezz Theme

I do still need to do something about the pictures being too wide for the content column and I’d like to get another picture of the kids up there. I’m sure I’ll figure something out, when I have a few spare minutes.

I’ve had my new Omnia about a week now and I really like it. I don’t even miss the physical keyboard of my Q9c (I really thought I would). The haptic feedback and xt9 spelling correction make the onscreen keyboard very functional. Of course, you’ll want to shut off xt9 when typing non-standard words (very easy with a key dedicated to it). The virtual mouse makes it so that I almost never need the stylus, but I have it hooked to my keychain (just in case), instead of the loop on the side of the phone. I’ve also mapped the menu button long press to a little program that switched the d-pad thing between normal d-pad and virtual mouse functionality.

I’m really hoping that Verizon Wireless makes good on their promise (if, in fact, this statement is from a Verizon Rep) to open up stand-alone GPS for the Omnia, but even if they don’t, there will be custom ROM on the web that will do it soon after the first update.

Here’s a list of software I’ve installed, so far (with links).

• S2U2
• S2V
• Adryn Modified Black ST2 Theme
• G-Alarm
• Seismo - Cool, but gives error on shutdown - need HTC dll’s
• Google Maps
• Google Mobile Search
• WMWifiRouter
• Kaisoft Bubble Level (trial)
• Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Internet Sharing
• MoDaCo AppToDate
• PHM Registry Editor
• pocketMax lunarTilt - gives error on shutdown - need HTC dll’s
• Pocket Rar
• Resco Bubbles (first 5 levels free) - Really fun game…
• QuickMark
• BeMario
• YouTubePlay

I’m also using the Samsung Today 2 today screen item (not available on Verizon Omnia by default, use registry hack to get it).

S2U2 handles my caller id and generally works great, although there have been a couple missed calls due to it wiggin out on me.

Sound quality is fantastic and it feels solid in my hand… I just carry it in my pocket and it doesn’t appear to have any scratches or anything, yet. We’ll see how that goes.

A standard mini or micro USB port would have been nice, but I’ll live with the proprietary one they gave me.

Well, a couple of months ago, I made Navajo County’s Parcel Search start getting data from the new Assessor’s database. They have moved from the Arizona Department of Revenue’s CCIS to Colorado Customware Inc’s RealWare product, affectionately known as CCI. All things said and done, it wasn’t too bad of a process.

Obstacle 1

Where is the data located?

With a lot of help from Mohave County’s Systems & Database Admin, Gary Waters, this step wasn’t too bad. I realized what I needed was the DataMart schema… but I didn’t quite understand how I was supposed to populate it. Gary kept telling me about this job they have that populates it nightly, but I couldn’t even find (in Oracle Enterprise) where Oracle keeps it’s jobs. I eventually found a query that would list them for me, but we had no such job.

The next day, or thereabouts, Jeff, one of the other Navajo County programmers, noted that he had found a DataMart application and had populated the schema. As he was explaining how to install it (it’s included in the advanced RealWare install), I realized I had seen it there when I was installing RealWare on my machine, duh. Oh well, all in a day’s work, I guess.

With the help of the SQL scripts that Gary sent along, I started to piece together how the data was arranged in the database. On to… Read the rest of this entry »

Not Found

Error 404

http://www.google.com/chrome

Update: Woohoo, it’s released, and so far, so good. I like it.

UGH!?! Give me Chrome… I need Chrome… If you haven’t heard already (Lord knows how you got here), Google is releasing a browser tomorrow (Tuesday). Google Chrome is set to be a major improvement over current browsers (even Firefox, although it likely won’t take Firefox long to build in the best features).

This is huge, why else would Arrington talk about it not once or even twice, but three times in less than four hours… did I mention it hasn’t even been made available, yet. It’s on just about every other tech blog I read, as well. Anyway, here’s the comic book Google released about it, if you’re interested (it’s kind of long, but a great read if you’re like me). You can also read about it on The Official Google Blog or on Google Blogoscoped.

Now, I know this can’t be intentional, but it’s very annoying, and I can’t see any easy way to make it go away. It looks like this is being caused by some Microsoft style CSS, as the page loads fine in Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3, however, renders the ad right over the top of other content. I sure hope they get this fixed over at lifehacker. I do like a lot of their articles.

UPDATE: It looks like this is happening all over the web with these annoying “Mojave Experiment” ads. A refresh usually fixes it. I haven’t really looked into the CSS that is creating this issue, but I’m sure it something Microsoft designed for IE and threw in compatibility with Firefox as an afterthought.

Well, I thought it was kind of weird that I stopped getting comments all of the sudden… even spam comments have been absent (for quite some time, now that I think about it). Well, Frank, from futtta’s blog informed me earlier tonight that my comments weren’t working. It was claiming that all the required fields weren’t filled (name and email).

Well, I got to work investigating the offending code, and it seems there was a name attribute missing from the input tag for email in comments.php for the finestripes theme. I simply added the attribute name="email" to the necessary input tag and it started working. Now, I guess it’s time to get Akismet up to date.

Sorry, Frank, for misspelling your blog’s name in my last post.

After my recent upgrade to Wordpress 2.6, I tried hitting the upgrade.php script, but was met with a blank page… That’s weird. So, I tried the home page… same thing… weird. Okay, I open my server log and find a php error:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SL in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 464

After googling, I found a post on futtta’s blog that described the same error. I fixed it the same way as he describes, by downloading the tarball and copying the a fresh copy of widgets.php over my offending copy. Viola, everything works as it should now, cept my search box seems a bit tweaked. I’ll have to check that out after I feed the kids.