From the award-winning documentary, "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music", comes the first of many "songs around the world" being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it travelled the globe.

Isn’t it too unnecessary to say more?!

You probably didn’t hear of Don.Jezzy ever before, but he’s my beloved little brother. Ever since I gave him my Canon Rebel XSi camera as a gift, he has amazed me with his talent in creative digital photography and design. The subjects of the photographs he makes and/or creates vary from occasional shots to sudden or long thought ideas. In this post I will only show two of the recent ones he published in his photostream and I’m sure this is just the beginning of his journey, although he’s been on the scene for quite some time now. Hope you enjoy what you’re about to see.

Caught by neon ribbons!

Do you see anything now?!

Your comments and evaluations are of course well valued from me and from him. If you like what you just see here I encourage you to check out his Flickr Profile and don’t hesitate to drop off a comment, let that be appreciation or criticism. We’re open-minded and accept both.

Eleven months ago I had an idea about a WordPress feature which gives a user the opportunity to put blog into maintenance mode, or turning it On/Off in special occasions to be more exact. I didn’t hesitate to suggest it to the public WP community. For eleven months, except good willing WP users, nobody from WordPress team has ever commented or said anything about possibly implementing that in any of the upcoming versions. Indeed, that can be achieved by developing a custom plug-in, but most bloggers (me for sure) tend to avoid activating too many plug-ins because it plods blog performance.

What about self-pinging?

Right! I’m sure you should already be aware of what does the term ping stand for in blogging. According to this WikiPedia article ping is:

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.^[1] An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

Now there’s this very requested feature (No-Self-Ping) that has been discussed a lot around the interwebs lately, but at the time of writing it is only available as a plug-in. Honestly, pinging your own blog posts is sometimes very annoying, however, some bloggers don’t mind that but some others really do. Hence, thankfully to No-Self-Ping by Michael Adams, the annoyance is long gone and forgotten. I just had to play around with WP Core files and have modified some of them to add this option in WP-Admin –> Settings –> Discussion Settings for the only reason of not being a fan of too-many-activated-plugins at once.

Wouldn’t you really appraise a neat feature like that, an optional setting that can be turned on and off based of each of us personal taste.

Now as for No-Self-Ping, it isn’t really a big deal though because it is the smallest plug-in I have ever come across until today, so it wouldn’t really decrease your blog’s performance much. Only seven lines of code for a very useful option.

[sourcecode language="php"]
< ?php
function no_self_ping( &amp;$links ) {
$home = get_option( 'home' );
foreach ( $links as $l =>$link )
if ( 0 === strpos( $link, $home ) )
unset($links[$l]);
}
add_action( ‘pre_ping’, ‘no_self_ping’ );
?> [/sourcecode]

Seriously I would like to see this feature in the upcoming version WordPress 2.8, it will save our time and it’s nice to just have it there.

Where do you stand in this? Do you like pinging your own blog posts, or rather have that thing turned off?

As the title indicates, I am going to share with you what I had to do just yesterday after installing WAMP Server on my laptop where I run Windows 7 Beta Operating System. Honestly I never experienced this kind of trouble ever before but strange things happen regularly as we face technology on our day-to-day basis.

A little story first. I had WAMP services all running smooth and sound, however, whenever I typed http://localhost on any browser in my system, it returned a Page Not Found result. I was still able to access my local web server using 127.0.0.1, but then when it came to loading WordPress locally, no stylesheet was loaded and the page layout was totally naked. I may just assume that could also be tweaked by altering WordPress address (URL) in Admin –> Settings –> General page, but I preferred the standard approach so I had to dig deeper. If you ever happen to encounter the same issue then keep following me till the end of this explanation.

In every Windows OS there are two files, one called lmhosts.sam and the other hosts, lying deep inside C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc folder. Of course that differs for Windows NT editions, simply replace C:\Windows with C:\WINNT. Now lets get back to our task. I needed to tell Windows to consider localhost as I’d have entered 127.0.0.1 on the address bar. Hence I went and opened the hosts file in Notepad (you can use any text editor for this). All you have to do to fix the problem is go to the end of hosts content and make sure whether there is a line like this

127.0.0.1               localhost

If false, then type that in, just be sure to leave a space between the 127.0.0.1 address an localhost.

For some particularly strange reasons, after I did that WAMP still hesitated to work. So I pasted that into lmhosts.sam file too and the spell was gone.

Note: Keep in mind that normally these two files should already be configured by default once you install Windows, but this case is specific to Windows 7 Beta, therefore it’s not that strange to not be that way.

Did you experience such a problem? Were you able to fix it? Tell me your story, I’d be glad to read it.

WampServer is an open source WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL and PHP) web server, free to use with a GPL license. With other words it’s a must-have web development suite for web developers running any Windows Operating System version.

Yesterday an update was released, so I thought it’d be good to spread the announcement. The change log shows the latest occurrences to its core:

2.0-g -- 03/08/2009
now using PHP 5.2.9
now using MySQL 5.1.32
now using PHPMyAdmin 3.1.3
corrected a menu bug with apache 2.2.11
corrected notices generated by refresh.php

I even recommend it above all other possible alternatives though. Might be simply because I’m used to it, but it definitely is easy to use and configure. Well, actually it comes pre-configured but still you can’t say anything if you haven’t tried it yet.

There’s a new addition to the scene of WAMPs, a new web server called PAMPA-J an acronym for Portable Apache, MySQL, PHP Application plus Jaxer. Just downloaded it and maybe tomorrow I’ll give it a try if time promises.

Additional notes: check out this comparison of WAMPs (WikiPedia.org Article). Seems like most of them are outdated but it’s worth doing a little research until you settle your butt with the best among them.

Now that’s not a speculation. It’s a sad fact. As a matter of fact it’s disgusting. It’s something that should have been accomplished long time ago. It’s kinda absurd to try and think of what are they waiting for. WordPress Theme Editor sucks, always have. Despite that themes are easy to activate and customize, but it’s a pain in the ass to edit one within WP. Why, why, why?! (yelling out loud!).

Love me or hate me but I take no justification for this. I’m sure you don’t either. WordPress as the most popular blogging platform has a lame Theme Editor. The same applies to Plugin Editor too, for it’s no better than the alike. This situation would raise many curious questions but I honestly don’t want to go into all that. I think it’s really not worth discussing about it, or maybe it is. Well actually it is something to discuss about, and that of a high importance.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t usually like to assume a lot but you have to forgive me this time. Now, assuming that you all know what jQuery is (though you must know because jQuery rocks), I want to make a statement. Packt Publishing has just released the newest edition of the Learning jQuery 1.3 book, featuring the latest changes in jQuery framework. This book is for:

…web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. Basic JavaScript programming knowledge is required. You will need to know the basics of HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries required.

The good news is, there’s a chance you might win a copy of this book for free. Say what?
Oh yeah. The good guys at NETTUTS (particularly Jeffrey Way) in collaboration with Packt Publishing are showing off their generosity by giving for free some copies of the book to the lucky readers. Nothing special is required to participate in this contest, all you have to do is simply leave a comment asking for it, and sit back whilst keeping your fingers crossed and pray that luck will be on your side. I don’t do that because I don’t really believe in luck.

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to giving it a read, or maybe even win a free copy, or maybe not, so I’ll order it then. But no matter what one should have this in the bookshelf.

P.S. 1,544 comments have been made within the last 24 hours, but don’t be sad, for I’m going to pray for you all, hope I get the same in return.

We all now Windows Live Messenger. As a matter of fact, it’s the most used IM client world-wide, and with the release of Windows Live Essentials 2009, Microsoft took it’s cool tools to a higher level. My concern this time is Windows Live Messenger, as I’m forced to use it on regularly basis because many of my contacts don’t really use anything else instead.

Live Messenger has very nice features, and the UI of the 2009 version is simply amazing. There is one thing, however, it’s not perfect as it should have become for all this darn years. For instance, it doesn’t yes offer polygamy (you have to get a patch for it), censored file type transfer, number of simultaneous transfers etc.

I remember couple of months back when they improved the UI of Windows Live Hotmail, first thing that I had to confront with was a screen with an announcement. What caught my eye was a single line saying: “You spoke. We listened.” They may have listened, but not enough I suppose.

Now lets get back to Messenger. See, I suggested a feature, well it isn’t maybe a feature but more of an improvement. I’m talking about the ability to choose different picture for different chat window, instead of using the same image for all windows. It may not matter to somebody, but it does have an importance to me. Imagine this, if you’re talking to somebody you know, and put your personal picture on chat, but there’s someone else you don’t know and you don’t prefer to expose your self to him/her. Which you’d prefer in such situations, Arian’s or Microsoft’s idea. I mean come on, it’s not hell of an innovation, but a small thing that a corporate of people should have thought before me. Or do they have a particular reason not to do so? If you know or something I’d be thankful to tell me, until then I firmly stick to my suggestion.

It’s ridiculous to think of how long I’ve been hoping since my last feedback addressing Live Messenger. This feature should have accompanied Messenger IM Client ever since. Indeed, I wrote two times and was totally ignored. Well, Microsoft, if you say you listen, I recommend you open up your ears a lot more than you do, because I spoke and that twice.

P.S. Few days ago, Microsoft had forced users of previous Windows Live Messenger 2009 builds (i.e. 14.0.8050.1202 and below) to upgrade to the version 14.0.8064.0206. It makes me wonder, if they can do that for Live Messenger, why not do the same for IE6?!
You tell me. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.

Bad things happen. Yesterday night, iTechnologize along with other 15 sites that are hosted in my server, went unexpectedly offline. Everything seemed to be fine, I wasn’t even predicting for something evil to happen and whilst I was submitting some code to my theme, Chrome returned a DNS error.

It caught me unprepared and since being hosted by MT for 2 years I can’t remember them having such a serious problem, ever.

It seemed to have been an issue derived from the latest firmware update they have performed.

According to Bluearc engineers our recent firmware update introduced a new bug that we have never seen.
At this very moment we are trying to restore all services on the Cluster by isolating out Storage Segment 2*, which appears to be the problematic segment.

Now it’s obvious that my sites are not on Storage Segment 2, hence you can read this post right now.
If you happen to be hosted by MT too, check out their weblog posts regarding last incident to keep updated.

Thankfully we’re back again, and I still highly recommend them regardless of the problem, since this was a one time only incident. Never had one before.

P.S. I’m preparing two post, one for later and the other for tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I never liked Flash, don’t do now, and never will in the future, for the single reason that staying in front of the monitor waiting for a flash site or animation to load, was too frustrating. I couldn’t bare to get along with it.

But I can’t deny, however, that many nice things can be accomplished with ActionScript, regardless of my dislikes. In that behalf, I couldn’t help but sharing with you this funny video.

Replaying it for couple of times, it made me look to finding who’s the talented chap behind this creative accomplishment. Google Search returned a creative artist called Alan Becker and his hilarious Animator vs. Animation flash game.

Alan seems to have been idle for some time now, nevertheless, everyone is able to play the game through a link he provided on his deviantART profile.

Again, it is what it is, even though the game is so much fun, I’m still sticking to my rule about flash.