So this morning I fired up my iMac at work to continue on with editing this PHP form I have been working on. Now I usually use TextMate for my daily editor, since it is very lightweight.
Since I hadn’t actually created a TextMate project file, I just selected all the files and opened them using “Open With” in the context menu. Now normally I ignore the fact that I see the Opera browser listed in the menu, but now I saw it twice. I decided to find out where they live.
Turns out that the most updated versions of Adobe Device Central CS4 and Adobe Bridge CS4 contain Opera in the application package bundles. Opera version 9.27 is inside the Adobe Bridge CS4 application bundle while Opera version 9.20 is inside the Device Central CS4 application bundle.
I can understand why Adobe might need to ship Opera inside their application bundles to make their apps work, but I really wish that the Mac OS wouldn’t see them as usable outside the Adobe usage.
For those of you who are in the iPhone developer community or just are just geeky enough to pay for the developer program in order to get a sneak peek on your friends, I thought I would let you in on some information I received from Pandora concerning problems with the Pandora Radio application and the 3.1 beta.
I noticed that after updating to 3.1 Beta I was no longer able to access my Pandora Radio application. The application would run, but eventually I would get an error screen that told me it couldn’t connect.
After trying various troubleshooting techniques on my own I e-mail Pandora support. Mike at Pandora gave me an extended set of instructions to follow:
In particularly stubborn cases, in addition to deleting Pandora from your iPhone, you may also have to:
- delete Pandora from the iTunes list of Applications on your computer (it’s an option in iTunes from the list on the left, below Music)
- sign out of the iTunes Store (click your iTunes Store sign-in information, usually an email address, in the upper right of the screen and select ‘sign out’)
- re-sync your iPhone within iTunes
- then sign back in to the iTunes Store (again, in the upper right)
- re-sync your iPhone one last time
Then re-install Pandora, either via the App Store on your iPhone, or via iTunes on your computer.
After trying all of that, the application would still not talk to Pandora’s system. I then tried the drastic step of doing a factory restore on the iPhone using the 3.1 Beta download as the firmware. This still didn’t help much.
After reporting all of this back to Mike at Pandora, I received the following reply via e-mail:
Hi Andy,
Sorry about that. We’re aware of this issue with the app not working with the 3.1 OS and we’re hoping this is solved in our next release. Thanks so much for your patience in the meantime!
Best,
Mike @ Pandora
While this was not unexpected, given that I am running a non-production release of the OS, I was quite gratified to find out that they were aware of the issue and working on it. There have been other times where support personnel have told users “Sorry, we can’t help you because you are running our software in a non-standard environment.” Kudos to Pandora for not reacting that way and for giving a meaningful response.
Update (2009-07-14 11:52PM EDT):
After updating to Beta 2 of OS 3.1 tonight Pandora Radio is now working again.
In WordPress the editing section of both Posts and Pages uses TinyMCE. TinyMCE is a Javascript-based WYSIWYG editor that is used in a myriad of web applications and platforms. It works by converting HTML Textareas or other elements into an editor for the user. TinyMCE is very extensible by using plugins to extend the functionality from the default setup. There are quite a few commercial and free plugins available.
At my current job I am working on a project with a fellow WordPress fan, Joe Searcy, to convert from Adobe Contribute as our web-publishing platform to WordPress MU. There are a number of education folks out there using both single-player WordPress and WordPress MU to manage the website for their institutions.
One of the challenges as an institutional webmaster is having to reign in the users so that they will not create content that is tremendously ugly and makes your eyes bleed, yet you also have to give them a certain amount of editorial and visual control so that they don’t feel like their freedoms are being stepped on.
The Adobe Contribute engine with the use of the Contribute Publishing Server made this fairly easy with the role-based administration. As the webmaster, I could limit what things the users could do in regards to the styles that they can apply to the webpage content as they create and edit it.
While WordPress MU roles don’t give you the ability to turn off certain functions, such as changing the forecolor of text in a post or page, this is easily controlled by editing the configuration files that implement the TinyMCE editor.
The file is the same in a standard install of both single-player WordPress and WordPress MU. Here’s the directory tree showing the location of the file we need to edit:
In this file you need to look for a function entitled
function wp_tiny_mce
The section of code that handles the arrangement and appearance of the buttons will be around line 1221. Here’s the code from a unmodified WordPress MU that handles the TinyMCE buttons when “Showing the Kitchen Sink”. This code allows a user to change the forecolor (aka textcolor):
$mce_buttons_2 = apply_filters(‘mce_buttons_2′, array(‘formatselect’, ‘underline’, ‘justifyfull’, ‘forecolor’, ‘|’, ‘pastetext’, ‘pasteword’, ‘removeformat’, ‘|’, ‘media’, ‘charmap’, ‘|’, ‘outdent’, ‘indent’, ‘|’, ‘undo’, ‘redo’, ‘wp_help’ ));
This is the code for the second row of buttons. There are also variable for a third or fourth row of buttons, but they are not currently used.
If you wish to remove the ability to change the forecolor (aka textcolor) when creating or editing a post or page then make the code look like this by removing the text shown above in red:
$mce_buttons_2 = apply_filters(‘mce_buttons_2′, array(‘formatselect’, ‘underline’, ‘justifyfull’, ‘|’, ‘pastetext’, ‘pasteword’, ‘removeformat’, ‘|’, ‘media’, ‘charmap’, ‘|’, ‘outdent’, ‘indent’, ‘|’, ‘undo’, ‘redo’, ‘wp_help’ ));
If you notice, all the was removed was the array entry for forecolor. The same methodology can be applied the the other buttons that are shown in the TinyMCE bars.
Be careful what you remove in this file, since it controls the posting mechanism for both pages and posts. Also, the changes are not role-based, so the apply evenly to everyone, including administrators.
For those of you who are into browser plugins, you may have run across a plugin called Inquisitor. According to the website, Inquisitor:
speeds up your searches like no other
While this may be true after several searches I determined that I wanted to go back to using the default Safari search plugin features instead. Unlike the XMarks plugin, the Inquisitor plugin doesn’t come with an uninstallation script. The Inquisitor FAQ lists the following instructions on removing the plugin for Safari on Mac OS X:
- Navigate to your hard drive device
- Select the “Library” folder
- Select “InputManager” folder
- Delete the “Inquisitor” folder
- Restart Safari
My experience with this was not quite as nice as the FAQ would lead you to believe. The main issue was that I had to actually logout of my user session before the bundle was released and could be emptied from the trash.
The second issue I had with the instructions was that they are incomplete.
Like many software developers on the Mac, David Watanabe, did not provide a complete uninstaller for the plugin, he just told you to go delete a few files. I find this a very poor practice when writing software. If you installer writes files and preferences to particular locations, then you should provide an uninstallation routine that removes those files.
After some searching, here is a list of the files that you need to remove in order to completely expunge Inquisitor from your system:
- /Library/InputManagers/Inquisitor/
- /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Inquisitor/
- /Library/Recipts/inquisitor.pkg
- /Library/Recipts/inquisitorPreflight.pkg
However, since this is a plugin for Safari that gives you options to configure, you should also take the time to remove the entries added to the Safari plist file. The plist is named com.apple.Safari.plist and is stored in the /Users/username/Library/Preferences/ directory.
Here are the entries to remove from the plist file:
- kInquisitorAutocomplete
- kInquisitorBeaconEnabled
- kInquisitorNumberOfResults
- kInquisitorNumberOfSuggestions
- kInquisitorOrdering
- kInquisitorRepairDefaultShortcuts
- kInquisitorSearchHistory
- kInquisitorSearchSitesA
- kInquisitorSearchSource
- kInquisitorShowSearchViewA
- kInquisitorVersionCheck
Due to expenses and performance issues, not to mention the massive outage and data loss that occurred in May of 2009, I have decided to move on to a new hosting solution for arfore.com and the other sites I host.
After doing some research into what others are using as well as the cost involved, I decided to migrate to AN Hosting.
AN Hosting got started as a two-person operation in 2001. In 2005 they were bought up by Chicago, Illinois-based midPhase Hosting. Their hosting plan was pretty reasonable. It compares nicely with the cost of my MediaTemple (gs) account. One of the great things about it was the cost. Since AN Hosting plans are paid for in advance (either 12 or 24 month plans) you get the same services for less than half the cost of the MediaTemple account.
The control panel that AN Hosting uses doesn’t have quite the same visual polish that the MediaTemple Control Center has. They both use CPanel, but the interface with MediaTemple is much slicker in comparison. The only real gripe I have so far with the AN Hosting Cpanel is that I can no longer directly control all aspects of the DNS Zone files the way I could before. You still have the ability to create MX records, but the other aspects of DNS are handled by the sysadmins. This is a fairly small issue.
As I get further into the hosting I will write a fuller comparison of the systems and any potential shortcomings that I see.