WordPress Write Post Problem

I use a HTML editor called Nvu to create my posts. It may not be the best HTML editor that runs in Linux, but it gets the job done and, for the most part (except for inserting needless   commands all over the place), it doesn’t get in my way.

When I’m done writing a post, I then copy and paste it into WordPress. If WordPress worked liked MovableType, all I would then need to do is publish the post. But it isn’t MT. For some reason, WP continually inserts <br> tags all over the place, including within other tags. Of course, the tags within tags breaks the original tag so that is a critical bug but the others are just as frustrating. Especially when I write a longer post and I have to go back and re-edit it in WP to get rid of all the inserted <br> tags. Yes, I know, you are supposed to
signal a paragraph break by hitting the return key twice. But this assumes I am using their editor to create the post. Why can’t WP just leave my HTML alone?

I also had problems when I wrote the post about Xandros XN unable to parse problem. In that post, I have alternating sections of regular and italics text. For some reason, WP would force all the text to italics. I tried making all kinds of changes to fix this but WP kept overriding my HTML with its own. Said crufty HTML looked like line after line of repeating empty <em> </em> tags.This, even though I checked my original code against the W3C validator which confirmed my code was XHTML 1.0 strict compliant. Unfortunately, it took me two hours of going back and forth while I repeatedly deleted all these empty tags, which would be re-inserted every time I saved my work.

Compare this with MT where I just copied, pasted, and published.

So, there must be a way of turning off all WP formatting features. I’ve already turned off, in /Options /Writing, the “Users should use the visual rich editor by default” and “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” (this second option was the only way I could get the italics problem to go away. And yes, my HTML still validates without the help of WP). Is there something else I need to turn off so I can just get WP to publish my HTML without changing any of it?

Aloha

F-22s Flounder While Flying Due to Faulty Computer Code

Recently, six of the most advanced fighter aircraft the US has, the F-22 Raptor, were on their way to Japan from Hickam Air Force Base here in Hawaii. All was going well until, while crossing the International Date Line, several all critical computer systems suddenly went off line. Pilots frantically tried to reboot and bring the systems, such as communications, fuel delivery, and navigation back up. To no avail. So, here they were, flying blind with less computer power than a single engine Cessna has. Fortunately, the weather was fine, they were not in combat, the refueling tankers were near by, and they were able to act as pathfinders for the crippled F-22s. All returned safely to Hawaii where it was diagnosed that a couple of computer code lines crashed the entire system.

The code was fixed and the aircraft were back on its way in 48-hours. Still, it shows how dependent we’ve become on computers…[follow this link for the full story].

Hamad Darwish Wallpapers for Vista

I can go weeks, months even, without a new wallpaper. But this is just about the third week in a row that I have a new one. This week is a collection of images taken by commission for Microsoft Vista by photographer Hamad Darwish. Although the images shown at the first link didn’t make it into Vista, the first two at this link did.

Aloha

Helix Nebula from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope

This week’s wallpaper is also from NASA. Clicking on the image will take you to a 6.4MB (3,000 X 2,400 jpeg) version:

This infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a cosmic starlet often photographed by amateur astronomers for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

The nebula, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, belongs to a class of objects called planetary
nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these colorful beauties were named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets like Jupiter.

Planetary nebulae are the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. When sun-like stars die, they puff out their outer gaseous layers. These layers are heated by the hot core of the dead star, called a white dwarf, and shine with infrared and visible colors. Our own sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.

In Spitzer’s infrared view of the Helix nebula, the eye looks more like that of a green monster’s. Infrared light from the
outer gaseous layers is represented in blues and greens. The white dwarf is visible as a tiny white dot in the center of the picture. The red color in the middle of the eye denotes the final layers of gas blown out when the star died.

The brighter red circle in the very center is the glow of a dusty disk circling the white dwarf (the disk itself is too small to be
resolved). This dust, discovered by Spitzer’s infrared heat-seeking vision, was most likely kicked up by comets that survived the death of their star. Before the star died, its comets and possibly planets would have orbited the star in an orderly fashion. But when the star blew off its outer layers, the icy bodies and outer planets would have been tossed about and into each other, resulting in an ongoing cosmic dust storm. Any inner planets in the system would have burned up or been swallowed as their dying star expanded.

So far, the Helix nebula is one of only a few dead-star systems in which evidence for comet survivors has been found.

This image is made up of data from Spitzer’s infrared array camera and multiband imaging photometer. Blue shows infrared light of 3.6 to 4.5 microns; green shows infrared light of 5.8 to 8 microns; and red shows infrared light of 24 microns.

Aloha

Windows Vista Marred by Third-Party Driver Lack of Support

I’ve been using Windows Vista Home Basic for about three or four days. Obviously, this is not a long time. But within this time, I’ve found some significant problems.

First, let me say Vista is very beautiful looking. The colors, fonts, themes, and all the other visual details are great. Secondly, it appears faster than XP.

But in order for it to be of use to me by helping me get my work done, I need third-party vendors to support it, now. For example, HP does not have a Vista driver for my HP2600N LaserJet color printer. This is a current printer and, you would think, HP would have had time to write drivers for their current product line. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Further, my Cingular wireless laptop card for accessing the Internet also doesn’t have a driver (although Sierra Wireless has a stub that may work). Cingular goes so far as to say it’s the user’s fault that no driver is ready because the user should not be using new software! Talk about customer service.

Although many people already have Vista installed on their computers, these users are willingly taking part in leading edge software deployments and should expect that many popular applications and hardware devices will not work with their computer. Cingular Wireless does not at this time provide support for any connectivity solutions on the Windows Vista operating system.

Even installing the Adobe Acrobat 8 reader failed because, according to the error, the Temp directory was inaccessible or full. I assume this is because the directory that Adobe was trying to install to was set as read only and no matter what I tried, Vista would not allow me to change the permissions (yes, I was logged in with administrative privileges).

Lastly, I’ve already mentioned, in another post, my intermittent problems with the DVD/CD-RW drive.

All told, I am not able to print, use the wireless card, or reliably access the DVD/CD-RW drive. Based on this, I reformatted the drive and installed Windows XP.

What pains me even more is that there isn’t a better alternative. Both Linux and the Mac OS X have their won problems with third-party support, so switching to those operating systems are also a no go.

Perhaps in a year or two the third-party vendors will take the needs of their customers into consideration and provide Vista compatible drivers. Or maybe not. Until then, unless you have everything Vista compliant, I would not recommend installing Vista.

Aloha!

Part 4 of Upgrading a Dell Inspiron 1150 Laptop

This is part four of a four part post (part one, part two, and part three) on upgrading my old Dell Inspiron 1150. So far, I’ve replaced the 384MB of RAM with 1GB and replaced the slow 4,200rpm hard drive with a Hitachi Travelstar 7,200 unit.

Today I will talk about installing MS Vista Home Basic and the external USB 2.0 enclosure for the old hard drive. As posted earlier, I chose Vista Home Basic for several reasons. First, I have software the runs best/only in Windows. Secondly, Vista includes many bug and security fixes that may not be included in Windows XP. Although it probably adds some new ones, overall it should be more secure than XP. I chose Home Basic, rather than Premium/Business/Ultimate, because my laptop, with only 64MB of shared video memory, does not meet the minimum requirement of 128MB for Home Premium and above. I also hoped that it would be faster in booting and exiting than XP (which, as I’ve noted, took several minutes to boot and almost as long to exit).

So after installing the new drive I powered up, inserted the DVD, and let Windows install. It took about an hour and a half from start to finish (including installing several updates). The trickiest part was partitioning the new drive. Although the install process has a point at which you can do this, it is not well explained. How I used to do this was to boot off of a bootable floppy (i.e., it was formated and included command.com) that had DOS utility fdisk on it. I would use fdisk to create an active primary partition and then an extended partition, whereupon I would then set the logical drives C: and D:. The Vista install includes a button that allows you to create, extend, or remove partitions. But here, “extend” does not equate with “extended”. As far as I can see, extend changes an existing partition’s size. So what I ended up doing was creating two primary partitions, and installed Vista to the first primary partition. I then formated both (I’m not sure I needed to do that because, I assume, the install would have done that anyway).

I’m not going to spend any time on how it looks (a lot of eye candy, even without Aero) because I’m focused on speed improvements. But I will comment on one problem that has arisen.

I’m having problems with the DVD/CD-RW drive (a Samsung unit). The problem is intermittent reading of CDs. It doesn’t matter if the CDs are ones I burned or original disks (I had problems with a CD from Microsoft that had the SR-1 for Office 2000 on it). Sometimes ejecting the disk and then putting it back in works. Sometimes multiple retries works. Sometimes opening a command prompt and using xcopy works. Sometimes nothing works. I’m not sure if its a problem with the driver (for now, I’m using the one that came with Vista rather than the one Dell has for XP) or what. All I know is it is very annoying.

But as to booting and exiting. For this configuration, booting and exiting, but especially exiting, seem much faster. Shutting down used to be a chore while the drive spun on and on. Now, it shuts down in a few seconds. This is much better. Now on to the external USB drive housing.

I bought the cheapest external housing I could find, a CompUSA unit. The purpose of the housing is so that I could make use of the old hard drive as sort of a high capacity floppy disk. That is, I could copy stuff to it to store or to carry to another PC. If I just wanted to place the drive in another PC, fellow Daynoter Sjon suggested getting a 2.5inch to 3.5inch adapter tray, which costs a lot less (about $10). But since I wanted to be make this drive mobile, I chose the external housing.

The housing is made out of aluminum and plastic. The upper and lower halves are aluminum while the center section, where the drive rests, is plastic. I say rests because I couldn’t see any provision for screwing the drive down. Four screws are included for, I guess, this purpose but where you are supposed to use them I can’t say. [UPDATE: The screws go into the drive from the bottom.] So, you lay the drive down onto the plastic tray while inserting the end with the interface pins into the corresponding connector. Then you replace the upper and lower halves and use some of the tiniest screws this side of a mechanical watch that you will ever see. Once closed up, there are two USB cables. One is for data and the other is for drives that require more power than is supplied by one USB connection. I seem to be okay with one cable but it all depends on the drive and, I guess, how much power the source USB connector can supply (I hear that some laptops and most external hubs don’t provide enough power). In any case (pun intended), it all works and I now have the equivalent of a very high capacity floppy disk (with attached cables). [UPDATE: Well, it sort of works. Both Windows XP and Xandros GNU/Linux recognize that a USB device is attached. Both recognize the Hitachi drive within the case. But neither will read or write to the drive. I even tried setting a jumper on the drive. I did this to see if the USB housing needed the drive to be in either "cable select" or "slave" mode. Neither seemed to make a difference. At this point, I'm not sure what to do to get it to work.]

Overall, would I do anything different? Yes, as I noted in part three, I would keep the data on the old drive until the new drive was up and running. Otherwise, adding the memory and new drive have given new life to my old laptop. So much so that I will keep using it for at least a year or two (or until Apple upgrades its MacBooks to include a card slot).

Aloha

Part 3 of Upgrading a Dell Inspiron 1150 Laptop

This is part three of a four part (part 1, part 2, part 4) post on upgrading my Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop to get better performance out of the admittedly cheap affordable, bottom-of-the-line PC. In today’s post, I will describe how to remove the old drive and install the new Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 7,200 rpm 2.5 inch drive.

Removing the hard drive requires removing two screws that hold the cover of the PCMCIA slot. Attached to the cover is the drive tray and drive itself. But first, remember to read and understand all directions posted in your manual. This includes removing the battery to reduce the possibility of electrical damage to existing components and properly grounding yourself before touching anything.

The drive slid out without problems but I noticed the connectors at the back of the drive was not the same as the new one! At this point, I panicked. Clearly, the new drive was not going to work. That is, until I took a close look at the old drive, which by the way is identified by Dell as an IBM but is actually also a Hitachi Travelstar, and noticed that there seemed to be an adapter (Thank you to Darron Marks for sending the photo.). I was able to *_carefully_* pry one end of the adapter and then the other end and finally lift the adapter off of the old drive. I then removed the four screws holding the old drive to the drive tray and removed the old drive. Using the same screws and drive tray, I inserted the new drive and placed the adapter on the pins of the new drive. The drive and tray slid easily back into the laptop and I secured everything with the two screws removed earlier and replaced the battery.

A short note about the Hitachi drive. I chose to use that drive because that’s what Dell used and because it was cheaper than the comparable Seagate. That does not mean you shouldn’t instead get the Seagate because, I think, it is a very good drive. You choose. Now back to the install.

With that, I was ready to boot up and insert the Windows Vista DVD. How that went is a post for another day. For now, I wanted to talk about a comment Sjon left regarding the old drive and when or if you should wipe it clean:

<snip>I would always first install and test the new drive before clearing the old one (I have had a couple of
new drives fail on first booting).

He is right, I should have waited until the new drive was in and operational before wiping the old drive as anything can happen. As it turned out it didn’t matter, but had I had problems with the new drive, I still could have reinstalled the old one and used my backup CDs to reinstall the data. But that would have taken a lot more time and effort than just reinstalling the old drive. So I agree with Sjon that you should wait until the new drive is in before deleting anything. This, however, begs the question of how to wipe the drive once you are ready to do that. Read below for the solution.

But first, that does not mean you don’t have to or should not do a backup of the drive before you remove it. I think for safety’s sake, a good backup is the best way to go, along with not wiping the drive until later.

Now, I had actually thought about using my old drive in an external USB case as a kind of large portable floppy disk. But I thought that would be too expensive (I seemed to recall that the cost of external cases were in the $100USD range). So, at first, I didn’t try this. But after getting Sjon’s comment, and realizing it would be difficult to wipe the drive once I’d removed it without reinstalling it somehow. I looked into the actual cost and found one at CompUSA for about $20. This seemed reasonable to me so I got one. For $20, you should not expect much and not much is what you get. But it works.[UPDATE: No it doesn't. Both Windows XP and Xandros Linux recognize that the drive has been attached, but neither is able to access it. I don't know why but cannot recommend this enclosure.]

[UPDATE 2: Well, the problem appears to be the drive itself. Perhaps it got damaged when I removed it or maybe it was already ready to go and I changed it just in time. In any event, the external case works, it's the drive that didn't.]

So, what I could have done in the beginning was do a backup of all my data but not wipe the drive and instead install it in the external case. I then could have installed the new drive and then transfered the contents of the data partition to the new drive via USB, then wiped the drive. Of course, my old laptop doesn’t have USB 2.0 so the transfer would be a little slow, but it would still be more convenient.

The bottom line so far is that the new drive and memory has really brought this old laptop back to life. Everything is faster now. For program loading, it is *_much_* faster. It used to take almost a minute for Firefox to load. Now it almost snaps instantaneously to the screen. Although the great majority of the speed increase is from the faster hard drive, adding the memory also helped.

The down side is that battery run time may go down since the new drive may be consuming more power. But even if this is true, and with advances in electronics and drive mechanisms it might not make that much of a difference, the speed increase is worth it to me. YMMV. Insert disclaimer here.

Part 4 will cover the installation of Microsoft Vista Home Basic and how to install the CompUSA external USB hard drive case. Stay tuned.

Aloha

Part 2 of 4 – Dell Insprion 1150 Upgrades Phase II

The new Hitachi hard drive and copy of Windows Vista Home Basic for my Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop came in yesterday. So last night I deleted unneeded files and backed up what I wanted to save. I then wiped the data volume (I always partition my drives to separate the programs from the data) five times using the shredding utility that is included with Spybot Search and Destroy.

Tonight I’ll remove the old drive and install the new. It is interesting to see that the drive is accessed by removing the cover
for the PCMCIA slot. I guess there’s not a lot of room in a laptop so you have to double up like this. But I wonder if it is a good idea to place the drive, which gets hot when running, next to the PCMCIA slot, which also can get hot when a card is in operation.

In any case, I’ll work on it and see if things go well [as if that could ever happen - ed.]

Aloha

Wikimedia Needs Your Help

Okay, I don’t ask for money. At least, not for myself. But on occasion, I have asked you to donate to what I feel are worthy causes. If you are offended by that, feel free to read on down to another post.

For those who are still here, the Wikimedia Foundation, the folks behind the popular Wikipedia (“The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”), needs your monetary help. Why? Well, for starters, it costs about $75,000USD per month to run Wikipedia! $75,000. Per month.

Secondly, the goals (or “wishes” as Foundation Chari Nibart-Devouard put it) for 2007 are four fold:

1. Sustainability
2. Reliability
3. Outreach
4. Recognition

All four goals revolve around money. In order to keep operating, they need money to hire people (as of December of last year, they employed only eight people!) to do the necessary work. Some of it is administrative, some of it is for developers. All of it costs money. Some of the work includes increasing the reliability of the information on Wikipedia. Or as the Chair put it “Content quality, not quantity, is the measure that matters.” Toward this end,
the Chair believes the Foundation must reach out to everyone, including large donors who do not recognize that Wikimedia is a non-profit (under the US tax code 501(c)(3)).

The bottom line, as the Chair put it, is that there are “deficits” that need to be corrected. Some have already been. Others are ongoing. Some must wait for the right opportunities.

But all of this depends on money.

Some of you, perhaps with good personal reasons, do not wish to or cannot support Wikipedia. Fine. I’m not here to try to change anyone’s mind and I certainly can’t force anyone. But for those who see value in having the Wikipedia as a ready source of information on 1.6 million topics (and growing), please go here and donate.

Thank you. [Thanks for Robert Scoble for the heads up]

Aloha

Adding RAM to a Dell Inspiron 1150 and Other Changes

This is part one of a four-part posting.

Awhile back, I had an interesting situation in upgrading the RAM in my Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop. It came with one 256 MB and one 128 MB RAM chip in slots A and B, respectively. This made for some really slow computing. So I purchased a pair of 512MB chips from Kingston. But when I installed them, and turned the laptop back on, it refused to boot. In fact, other than one of the LEDs flashing a few times, it would simply shut down.

So, first I swapped back the original pair of chips (after shutting down and removing the battery, per Dell instructions) and everything worked fine. So I tried installing one of the 512s and the 256 (after shutting down and removing the battery) but got no joy. So, I tried just a single 512 with the “B” slot empty (after…well, you know the drill). That worked. So I shut down again, removed the battery, and installed the second 512 chip. Low and behold, the laptop booted successfully and recognized the 1GB of RAM. I have no idea why I had to do the installation in steps, but it worked for me.

Unfortunately, I have been underwhelmed by the speed difference. Don’t get me wrong, there is a difference, but it’s not dramatic. Although programs run a little better, the boot process is still measured in minutes (I’m not kidding here, it takes minutes to boot). But, for awhile I just lived with it since I didn’t use the laptop that often.

But recently, I decided to bring the laptop from home to work so I could use it for meetings away from my office. Since it would not be appropriate to connect my laptop to the network (since they frown on attaching non-government owned PCs), I decided to get a Sierra Wireless AirCard(r) 875 PC card from Cingular Wireless/AT&T. This provides Internet access wherever a cell phone would work. Although Cingular does not have 3G service yet in Hawaii, when it does, this card supports it. In the mean time, the speed it does get is fast enough for email and web browsing.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, in getting the software installed and configured by the very patient Cingular sales person, my slow hard drive took so long that I was embarrassed by its lack of speed and decided enough was enough.

So, I ordered a Hitachi Travelstar 7K100. This is a 7,200rpm second generation 2.5 inch drive. I am hoping that the speed difference between this drive and the original IBM 4,200rpm unit that came with the laptop will make a noticeable difference. Along with the drive I also ordered a copy of MS Vista Home Basic.

Why Windows? Because I have software that runs only on Windows. Why Vista? Because I want something that will be supported as long as possible and because it is, in my opinion, more secure than XP. Why Home Basic? My laptop meets all of the hardware minimum requirements for the higher editions except for the video graphics. As far as I can remember, the built-in Intel graphics uses no more than 64MB (and maybe as little as 32MB) of shared RAM. Vista Premium/Business/Ultra requires a minimum of 128MB. Since the Intel graphics does not meet the minimum requirements, it would not make sense to pay for the more expensive features, such as Aero, when I can’t run it.

That said, I will also dual boot Vista with something else. What version of GNU/Linux I choose I’m not sure yet. Linux and laptops usually do not go well together because laptops tend to use proprietary components that many times require drivers. Said drivers are usually not made for Linux. However, some versions of Linux are getting better at supporting laptops so maybe I can find something that will work. If any of my 11 readers have any experience with getting Linux running on a Dell Inspiron laptop, please leave a comment here. Thanks.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone – Aloha