More bugs fixed, more testing

Thanks to Sergey for sending me his database for me to test with.

Noticed a few issues:

• The required database table wasn’t being created
• Category subdomain options weren’t being saved
• Permalink ‘/%postname/’ doesn’t work, it causes subdomain page to display all posts

I’ve fixed the first two issues.

The plugin directory now has to be in the wp-content/plugins directory, before a symlink from wordpress-subdomains would work, not now. Now when you update the plugin and deactivate/reactivate it any upgrades and table changes should be done properly.

The issue with the options not being saved was down to me doing something in a poor way that got broken when WordPress changed. I’m now doing it the correct way.

The final one is a mystery and it’s too late for me to investigate tonight. I seem to remember spending a lot of time last year trying to get all combinations of permalinks to work but it seems /%postname/ stopped working at some point. I will investigate further tomorrow.

I’ve commited all the fixes to the development trunk so if you wish to try it out download here. Remember to deactivate and reactivate the plugin after you upgrade. This may fix a number of issues straight away.

Almost there… Stay on target…

Didn’t get latest release out the door this weekend as planned, but I now have it to a point where I think it’s ready but just needs some testing. This version is the one that’s currently running this site under WP 3.0.

I can’t test for every type of wordpress setup, so I’m hoping that some of you might be able to give me a hand. If you wish to help test you can download the latest version here. If you wish to report a bug it’s better to contact me here, or just email me if you already have my address.

Overall there has been quite a lot of code change in this since the last release. Most of it was just rewriting code to behave better. One major change is you no longer have to configure the Pages with custom variables but with proper input elements which should make it a lot nicer.

One thing this version wont fix is multisite. Once this one is out the door I will start working on that.

MAG Charity Bike Ride – Vietnam to Cambodia 2011

Next year in January I will be cycling the 440km from Saigon in Vietnam to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

The ride takes a total of 5 days and will be raising money for MAG, the Mines Advisory Group. MAG is a charity that spends it’s time clearing unexploded mines, bombs and other explosives from current and former war zones. They have projects in many countries around the world and I’ve seen their work first hand in Laos when I was there a few years back. Whilst their work directly saves the lives of people who may accidentally trigger these dormant explosives, it also helps to hand back land to local communities so that it is safe enough for them to use again. They also educate the local populations about the dangers of these devices and provide employment for many people in these countries. You can read more about them here.

I have photos from my visit to Phonsavan, they help to give an impression of the scale of the problem. The explosives surrounded by sand bags in the scrap yard are yet to be made safe and could still kill.

More details about the bike challange are available here.

If you wish to sponsor me you can do so at my Just Giving page. If you’re a UK tax payer don’t forget to tick the gift aid box and the government will increase your donation by over 25%.

House buying woes

Back in March we finally found a house to buy in an area that we really like. Because of the current market there isn’t really a lot on but after a few months searching we found somewhere that was ideal. It had enough space, needed no immediate improvement, nice garden, good area and backed onto a park. The expansion potential is also very good.

We made an offer, had it accepted, got a mortgage and a solictor and waited for things to happen. Within a week the vendors had lost the property they had an offer on. This did not bode well but we figured it wouldn’t take them too long to find a new property. Three and a half months later we got back from holiday to find a letter from our solicitor, the chain was complete and things would start moving. Hurray!

I phoned the Estate Agents to get confirmation, yes they were buying an empty house with no chain, excellent. I then phoned the solicitor to ask what we needed to do and was told to just wait for the draft papers to come through. Three weeks later we’d not recieved anything, phone the solicitor again to ask what was up and she said she hadn’t heard from the vendor’s solicitor but would get in touch with them.

I figured I may as well phone the estate agents, our usual contact was on holiday so I spoke to another agent who said the vendors were still looking. “What? We were told they had an offer on a house”, this seemed to be news to this guy who said he’d contact the vendors and find out. Five minutes later he called back with the news that vendors no longer had an offer on the house as it required to much work to update so they’re looking again.

Well thanks a bunch for letting us know! It’s a shame you have no choice over estate agents when it comes to buying a house because with service like that I’d drop them and go elsewhere.

We’re now back where we were 4 months ago with an offer on a house who’s vendors have nowhere to go. It wouldn’t be so bad if the market was good enough for us to pull out and get another house but we keep looking and there is just nothing that matches what we’re looking for. When we first had the offer accepted we thought we might be in by now, at this rate it would be nice to be in by Christmas.

Testing on WP 3.0 and other issues

I finally found some time to load up my development environment and try out WP 3.0

I found that the development version of the plugin seems to work with WP 3.0. As this site is using the same version I decided to upgrade to WP 3.0 and see what happened. Well it all still works which is a good sign, so this weekend I’m going to go over the last few bugs I have in that version and release it.

If you’re having issues with the plugin where it seems to work, but shows all the posts when on a category subdomain rather than just that category’s posts then please can you contact me. I’m not sure, but I think the issue may be theme related, so wouldn’t mind getting a copy of your theme to test with.

All Apologies

I’ve just found that Google has been sticking all the mail from my site into the spam folder.

Sorry for those who I’ve not replied to, I wasn’t ignoring you.

Here’s the low down. As many of you guessed I’m not actively supporting this project anymore. When I was teaching in China I had plenty of time for PHP in my spare time but now I’m working PHP 8 hours a day I find it hard to bring myself to do it in my spare moments. For me functionality of the plugin reached what I wanted many versions back which didn’t help with giving me incentive to continue.

However it seems from the emails I’ve checked through in my spam bin that the plugin does not work with WordPress 3.0. So I am going to try and resolve this problem this week. Hopefully this will give me a reason to dust off the code that’s in development as it has many code improvements over the most recent release.

If you are currently experiencing bugs with the plugin please attach them as comments to this post and I’ll do what I can to fix them.

If anyone is interest in taking over this plugin then get in touch.

Rugger. Bugger

Bought some expensive tickets to the England – France game in paris. Paid for transport to paris and hotel. Just needed to beat Ireland and the match against France would be the battle for the 6 nations.

Well shit.

At least we can stop the french getting the grand slam i suppose.

Maemo goes MeeGo

If you follow maemo then unless you live under a rock you’ll have heard all about MeeGo.

Yesterday Intel and Nokia announced the merging of their two linux based mobile projects, Moblin and Maemo. This has certainly got a lot of people talking in the maemo community, but with little extended detail about the project a lot of assumptions are being made and some people are getting quite worked up.

Ari Jaaksi (head of maemo at Nokia) has posted some interesting bits of info. More details here at the Symbian Blog.

So basic info seems to be:

• MeeGo aimed at more devices than just phone (TVs, netbooks, etc)
• UI will be QT based, like Maemo 6
• Packaging system will be RPM, unlike DEB in Maemo
• Version 1 expected Q2 2010
• Will “build upon” the Moblin core software platform
• Will support both ARM and X86

The first question that’s raised is what happens to the Maemo community? Whilst those whose main interests are Maemo 5 and 6 may well switch there are many people who still support the older N770 and N8x0 tablets with the older versions of Maemo. Also it’s not yet known if the N900 will be officially supported or if it will need community effort to get MeeGo (or Maemo 6) onto it. From the Ari’s posts it seems if you’re developing for Maemo 5 in QT then your apps will work on MeeGo. Also it seems the contracts of the maemo community members paid by Nokia have been extended. So it looks like support of Maemo 5 is fairly safe during the lifetime of the N900.

The next question is, what happens to Maemo 6? On first hearing the news I figured this meant it would not get the chance to advance from Maemo 5 because of all the time involved with the merger. However something Ari said has proved quite interesting, “Maemo6 will be MeeGo compatible…..consider Maemo6 already a MeeGo instance”. This seems to imply that Maemo 6 has already under gone the merger work with Moblin and is already a version of what would be called MeeGo. Considering that Nokia and Intel first announced plans to cooperate back in June 2009 this could mean a lot of the work required for the merger of the two systems has already been done.

Anyway, enough with the speculation. I think for now it’s best to sit back and wait for the news to come in over the next few weeks rather than getting too worked up over rumours and assumptions.

Interesting times lie ahead.

Update: Another interesting announcement yesterday was the release of the Maemo 6 UI Framework, screenshots here.

Update 2: Quim Gill gives away some details of how this affects Maemo 6. Maemo 6 will be renamed, however it is not a full MeeGo product. Seems what I assumed earlier wasn’t correct.

Update 3: Anyone worried about Nokia support for N900 should feel slightly better today, minor firmware release (PR1.1.1) is out. This should pave the way for the next major release (PR1.2) due in the next few weeks. So far those who have upgraded report performance improvements. No offical changelog yet.

Ni hao, wo jiao Li Shan

“Hello, I’m called Li Shan”

On monday I started Mandarin evening classes. Two days a week, 2 hours per class. I have 5 weeks of classes in an intensive course that I hope will give me a good foundation that I can continue with the next level of classes.

When I was in China I picked up a number of words, phrases, and characters, but never really had any foundation to my “learning”, so it was hard to get it right and remember things correctly. After the first two lessons I’ve found a lot of what I picked up now makes more sense to me.

In the class last night I had to pick a chinese name. The teacher wasn’t too keen on the name I’d used with my Students in China, xióng mao (Panda), so we settled on Li Shan.

I’ll be back in China in June and look forward to practising what I’ve learnt.

Update: I did have the proper chinese characters rather than pinyin, but they just failed in wordpress.

N900 Maemo 5 PR1.1 released

Today’s the day. Maemo 5 PR1.1 was released at 7am local time in Finland.

Apparently the release is staggered through the various countries over the next 24 hours, so you might not have it in Application Manager just yet.

The update also brings changes to the SDK so be sure to update those if you’re a developer.

Extensive list of changes available here.