Now I need to get the sidebars arranged properly, bring the links up to date (and add  a few more while I’m at it) and finally bring the overall site set up to my liking. I haven’t had time to do too much planning on this yet but I mean to get started on it ASAP.

I also mean to start writing—more often that is. This poor old site has been languishing on the back burner this past year basically due to health reasons but with surgery behind me and recovery ahead I’m looking forward to having more productive time on the keyboard.

Looks like 2010 is going to be a very interesting year technology-wise so there should plenty to write about. Here’s to having lots of subject matter.

I am looking for someone (or people) to take over the management and development of the plugin.

The ideal candidate will be very familiar and adept with WordPress and plugin development, and should have some fairly well-known plugins under your belt.

There are many benefits to taking over this plugin. But you already likely know that.

Simply contact me via any of the contact forms on this site, and I will review your information, and pick the lucky new author(s).

I know that there’s a large group of WordPress powered site owners (including this one) who rely on WP-SpamFree to keep their incoming spam down to a dull roar. In fact in many cases using the plugin in combination with the likes of Akismet will nearly eliminate all spam comments as well as contact form spam when used with the included SpamFree Contact Form.

So if you’re a WordPress plugin developer or a developer whose been looking for an excuse to dive into WordPress plugin development, head over to the above referenced post, give it a read and then give Scott a holler. I’m sure Scott and a whole bunch of WordPress users will thank you for it.

Will Microsoft’s new OS run on old hardware? I mean really old hardware? Well, depending on just how old the hardware is the answer is yes it does. Rather well in fact.

Now I’m not going to talk about whether it’s worth the price of Windows 7 or whether it’s worth backing up all your stuff and “upgrading” from XP to Windows 7, there’s plenty of articles out there that have already beaten this subject to death and back again. All I’m going to do is give you my personal experience of running the Windows 7 Release Candidate (Build 7100) on my 7 year old HP a645c desktop PC.

As it stands:

Note: This is about as minimum spec as you’d want to go and still have a peppy system.

Manufacturer:                  HP Pavilion 061

Model:                               PC111A-ABA a645c

System memory:               1.00 GB RAM (DDR2)

System type:                      32-bit operating system

Processor cores:                 1 (AMD 3200+)

64-bit capable:                   No

Display adapter type:         NVIDIA GeForce 6200 (AGP)

Dedicated video memory: 256 MB

Optical drives:                    2 (1 Lite On DVD ROM, 1 Lite On DVD burner)

Display:                               19” wide screen

Original OS:                       Windows XP Pro SP3

New OS:                              Windows 7 Ultimate RC

That’s enough info to give you a good idea that this rig of mine is about as powerful as one of today’s higher end net books with a bit more graphics power (but not much since the old GeForce 6200 was never known to be anything but mediocre at best).

It is enough to run the Aero interface though.

So why did I attempt this feat on this old fossil of mine? Because I wanted to personally see if all the hoopla about the Windows 7 (beta/RC builds) was actually true or not. In short…yes it was.

To be realistic about it, this old XP machine could not have even come close to running Windows Vista. However, it flew right along on XP Pro SP3. It flew even faster when booted up with Ubuntu 9.04. But how would it take running Windows 7?

In short, this old beater of mine took to Windows 7 like it took to Windows XP and with almost zero problems. In fact the only problem I encountered after booting into the new OS was a single unknown device which turned out to be the on-board modem. This still wasn’t a problem since all I did was tell Windows 7 to go find a driver for it and after less than 30 seconds the Device Manager was completely happy.

I did a bit of UI tweaking much the same as when XP Pro SP3 was loaded on the machine with the single Windows 7 unique exception of turning Aero transparency off (I left Aero Peek on though). This wasn’t because I was looking for better performance as Aero ran fine for all intents and purposes—I just don’t like the effect. Personally I find windows transparency distracting but that’s just me.

This is how I set Windows 7 visual settings. Season to taste as it were:

(There’s 2 more settings at the top that you can’t see. Also unchecked)

Now, real quick like, I’d like to debunk a Windows 7 feature. The so-called “Windows Experience Index”. This feature “rates” your computer on 5 different areas:

• Processor
• Memory (RAM)
• Graphics
• Gaming graphics
• Primary  hard disk (hard drive)

The scoring goes from 1.0 to 7.9. Not too sure how they assigned 7.9 as the top end of the Experience Index but who am I to question these kind of things?

Now you might think that the overall rating would be an average of all 5 scores but it’s not. It’s actually the lowest score out of the 5 that’s suppose to be the final overall rating of the whatever hardware it’s running on and/or how satisfying your use experience will be.

That’s  funny, I didn’t know Microsoft knew exactly what kind of user I was as to be able to determine how satisfied I’d be?

Anyway, here’s the “Windows Experience Index” for my old war horse of a PC:

OMG, 2.5?!?! This machine must really crawl!

Crawl? Hardly, to say the least of it. It actually flies right along to be truthful about it. Sure, it’s not a gaming machine but it wasn’t one when it was new either. The HP a645c was an all around decent, general purpose desktop computer that was easily upgradable (to a point) when it first came out. Nothing more.

Now let’s look at something else that shows a more realistic picture of how Windows 7 sits on this ancient piece of hardware:

Everyone recognizes the good ol’ Task Manager, right? The one above shows the resource usage after a full day of beating on Windows 7. One thing though. Anyone who immediately points out the fact there’s only 64 MB of (Free) memory left needs to fall back and try again.

Forget Free. Free memory is nothing but a bit of extra gravy. What you need to pay attention to is available memory which is 609 MB plus that little bit of 64 MB gravy on top. Windows 7 has cached 580 MB of itself in memory (just as it should) with the other 609 MB mapped out and ready to go. In the end the whole thing boils down to one quick responding OS—even on this old hardware.

This is where Windows 7 really shines in that it actually gives back the resources that are no longer in use. I had window after window open (programs, explorer, browsers, graphic programs, etc), way beyond what I would normally use, until I showed 91% of memory in use and the OS was still nice and responsive. Then I closed all these extra windows and all of those resources were given back to the system. Yes, it did take a few minutes before the OS realized that I was through being ridiculous but after that the Task Manager showed what you see above.

I certainly couldn’t say that about XP.

Just to note; I have three programs that are constantly running and that’s my email client (Thunderbird 3.0 nightly builds), Diskeeper 2009 (w/ auto-defrag enabled) and my anti-virus suite (Avast! 4.8) which make up 7 of the 44 processes listed at the bottom left of the Task Manager image.

So there you go. Windows 7 running just fine and dandy on a 7 year old PC. In fact in many ways it runs better than XP ever did.

Of course not everyone who tries to put Windows 7 on old hardware are going to have an easy of a time as I did. My old machine is an “off-the-shelf” PC with standard pieces/parts stuffed into it with an extra 512 MB and a well known video card with it’s own dedicated memory added by yours truly. No OS developer will ever guarantee that you won’t have to go out and find an updated driver or three for stubborn/old/one-off peripherals or piece of internal hardware when a new OS is released. It’s just part and parcel of upgrading.

Again, I’m not saying that it’s worth going out and paying out $$$ to upgrade an old system to Windows 7, that’s not the point of this post. All I’m saying here is that it can be done and, in this case, very easily done with great results.

Anyone else out there running Windows 7 on old hardware?

To get to the point, Facebook offers a way to import your blog into Facebook Notes. And anyone who has had a Facebook account more than a day probably knows what Notes are. In short, to accomplish this task involved clicking on the Notes tab and then in the top of the right hand sidebar on the Notes page you would find a section called Notes Settings. In this section was a link that would take you to another page where you could perform the absurdly easy task of importing your most recent blog posts into your notes. Easy, huh?

Well, not anymore.

Sure, it’s still an absurdly easy task to perform but just you try to find it now. And this is what this post is all about thanks to some urging from a dear friend of mine to whom I initially passed on this grand new adventure in Facebook navigation in a recent email.

To wit:

From your Facebook “Profile” page click on the Notes tab near the top of the page. Once your "Notes page loads up, click on the title of one of your notes in the top section of the sidebar: (Click images to embiggen)

This will take you to your “single post page” (or note in this case). Now, look up above the title of your note and next to your Avatar you should see 3 links. Click on “My Notes”.

You’re almost there. When the next page loads up you’ll see that you’ve finally found that elusive “Notes Settings” section at the top of the the right hand sidebar. Click on the appropriate link in that section (“Import a blog” I believe) and I’m sure you’ll know what to do after that (the image below shows what the link looks like after you’ve imported your blog).

Now, importing your blog into Facebook, which is basically importing your feed plus a few fancy touches, is obviously not for everyone as it offers a chance for Facebook users not to go to your site in order to read and comment on your posts. Then again, not all your readers have Facebook accounts now do they? So it’s up to you to decide whether or not to take advantage of this feature. There’s no risk involved if you do import and decide later that it’s not for you. Just click on the “Edit import settings” as seen in the above image and it will take you to a very simple page that has but one option—“Stop importing”.

Of course you have to find it first.

Google Gears trouble

After waiting for an unusually long time for a version of Google Gears to be released that was compatible with Firefox 3.5, so long so that a member of the Gears-users Google Group finally cobbled together their own version that Firefox 3.5 users could install temporarily until Google got their act together. Well they did and subsequently released Gears version 0.5.29.0. And now, inexplicably, Firefox users who have updated to 3.5.1 have once again found Gears to be incompatible.

Well, not quite.

While it is somewhat questionable why the developers of Gears decided to set the absolute max version of 0.5.29.0 to Firefox 3.5, this latest version of Gears, unlike past versions, does actually work with the latest and very needed bug fix to Firefox 3.5. But one of two things need to be done first though in order to get Gears working again.

• Install the Nightly Tester Tools extension and use the “Override all compatibility” button at the bottom of the Add-ons Manager dialogue box to get Gears working again (I’ve already tested this, Gears works fine once this is done).

or

• Go into “about:config” and set extensions.checkCompatibility to False and restart the browser (this also works just fine). Just remember to set it back to True when Gears is finally updated. Forgetting to do this may cause a bit of future havoc if you happen to install an extension that’s not actually compatible.

On a more personal note, I find Google’s recent behaviour regarding Firefox and Gears support to be rather baffling and unacceptable. They had full knowledge as to when the Firefox 3.5 was to be released and should have had a compatible version of Gears released within a couple of days…but they didn’t. Then, again with full knowledge that version 3.5.1 was just a matter of days away (and pre-releases free for downloading and testing), the newest version of Gears “breaks once again.

For someone like myself who, for the most part, really doesn’t have a problem with Google or the way they do business, I find this kind of recent behaviour quite perplexing.

One of the things I’ve found more than frustrating when I’m banging around Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), which is more and more these days, is the fact that I simply cannot upgrade Firefox 3.0.* to 3.5. Oh, I can enable this or enable that and get the the latest daily build of 3.5.* (code name “Shiretoko”) or (shudder) the old Firefox 3.5 beta 4 that’s installed side by side with Jaunty’s default Firefox 3.0.* and shares the same profile but that’s not what I’m looking for. I want to upgrade Jaunty’s default Firefox 3.0.* to 3.5 not install another version along side of it and have it automatically set as default.

When I was booted into Windows I easily and quickly updated Firefox 3.0.* to 3.5 just by clicking on “Help/Check for updates” and Firefox’s update manager offered me the option of upgrading to the next major version. But this isn’t an option when using Firefox in Ubuntu. I have to wait until the next version of Ubuntu is released in October of this year before I can actually get the official “branded” version of Firefox 3.5 and by that time the 3.5 series will probably be up to 3.5.2 or better.

But now there’s a way to get the latest version of Mozilla’s browser without the wait and it’s called Ubuntuzilla. Using this small but powerful python script will upgrade Firefox, Seamonkey or Thunderbird to the latest Official versions. But for those of you just wanting to update Firefox 3.0.* to 3.5, read on.

The folks at SourceForge have posted the specific procedure for using Ubuntuzilla for installing the script and upgrading Firefox (also Thunderbird and Seamonkey as well) to the latest release. The procedure also installs the 2 required dependencies which consists of an automatic update checker coupled with a simple Desktop notification system to notify you of any future updates. This keeps you from having to start Firefox as root in order to enable the built in standard update checker under Firefox’s “Help/Check for updates”. I used the above procedure and it worked like a charm.

This is one of the very few real beefs I have with Ubuntu. Locking users into a single version of Firefox which allows for security updates only with no option for upgrading the browser to the next major version once it’s released. Firefox is Ubuntu’s default browser of choice and upgrading to the next major version should be as easy as it is for Windows and Mac users. Until this happens though we can thank the Ubuntuzilla team and the folks at Ubuntu Manual for giving us an easy solution.

PS: Just so you know, Ubuntuzilla also has a neat uninstall script which returns your system back to it’s original condition Firefox-wise which would probably have to be done for those who wish to upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 when the time comes rather than doing a clean install.

Update 07/17/09: Seeing that Firefox 3.5.1 was released today I had to actually start Firefox as root in order to download the update with the browser’s built in “Check for updates” feature which is also a function that Ubuntuzilla is supposed to give you. If Ubuntuzilla was supposed to notify me that this new update to Firefox was available, well…it didn’t. Still, being able to easily and quickly update the browser is a bonus so no real complaints.

Note: For those of who might have installed the developer’s version of Gears (0.5.25.0) in order to use Gears on Firefox 3.5 previously, this version needs to be uninstalled first prior to installing the official release. Otherwise, Google Gears homepage will only reinstall the Developer’s version again. The dev version can be easily uninstalled via the Add-ons Manager in Firefox. No Gears data should be lost during this uninstall.

The explanation behind the lack of support of Gears for testing pre-release builds of Firefox which, theoretically at least, would have paved the way for the immediate support of the new version once it became available, is that an entirely new build of Gears has to take place every time a new beta/RC build of Firefox comes available hence the lack of (public?) availability.

Hmmm, whatever.

However, for those of you that have been waiting patiently or not-so patiently for Gears support in Firefox 3.5 and who don’t mind testing out pre-release type software, the wait is over. A member of the Gears Users Google Group by the name of Geza Kovacs took the time to to put together 3.5 compatible Gears builds for Windows, Linux i386 and Linux x386_64 operating systems. Like any Add-on for Firefox these new Gears builds come as a “.xpi” file that installs just by clicking on the link. The download links are below:

Note: Clicking on the link will install the “.xpi” directly like any Firefox Add-on. Right-click and choose “Save link as” if you wish to download a copy of the file itself.

Windows:
http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears/gears-win32-opt-0.5.25.0.xpi
Linux i386:
http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears/gears-linux-0.5.25.0.xpi
Linux x86_64: 
http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears/gears-linux-x86_64-0.5.25.0.xpi

Understanding that the above builds are developer’s builds and not official releases, make sure your comfortable with testing pre-release software before trying them out. For what it’s worth, I installed the Windows version as soon as I saw it available on the Gears Users Group and I haven’t experienced a single problem with it. All my Gears enabled sites have worked fine once I downloaded each site’s files into the Gears’ cache including the WordPress Admins for this site and my personal blog. And from what I’ve read on the above Group, no one else has encountered a problem using these builds either. From my experience using the Windows version the build has been rock stable. Thanks Geza!