The ABC News website recently revamped their home page layout and invited feedback from their audience …
… which was overwhelmingly negative, and the moderator responds with a post basically saying that all that negative feedback is misguided, because, well the ABC is just doing what Facebook and Twitter do …
… as if Facebook and Twitter is the gold standard of Web user interface design!?!?!
What’s the point of asking for feedback if all you’re going to do is dismiss it?
The Shellshock bash bug has been getting a lot of press, and rightly so, as there are a large number of servers and devices potentially vulnerable, including devices such as ADSL modem/routers. I went looking to see if my NetComm NB604N modem/router was vulnerable, but couldn’t find any official word on the matter.
With a bit of investigation myself by telnetting to the modem I established that the modem is running BusyBox with the ‘msh’ shell, not ‘bash’.
So my understanding is that the NB604N is NOT vulnerable to the Shellshock bug.
My Holden car has a MyLink music system with a colour display in the console. One of the things it does is show the cover art of MP3 tracks as it plays them from an attached device. It seems that it gets the cover art from an embedded database of coverart (sourced from GraceNote) or from the MP3 file itself.
I put together a USB drive with my favourite MP3 tracks, but the conundrum was that for some tracks, the cover art would display correctly, and for other tracks, a generic image (based on the track’s genre) would display. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason why some would work and others not work, as most of the tracks had cover art embedded in the file.
This weekend curiosity got the better of me. Using the TagInspector ID3 editing program I observed the pattern that tracks where the cover art image DID display, had the text encoding of the APIC frame set to ISO8859_1 …
… whereas all the tracks that DIDN’T display the cover art had the text encoding of the APIC frame set to UTF_16_BOM (Unicode) …
Using the UltraID3Lib library I did a test by changing the text encoding of a track with UTF_16_BOM over to the ISO8859_1 encoding. After doing this, the cover art displayed correctly on the MyLink system. What’s curious about this is the encoding value is the text encoding of the Description field of the image (not the encoding of the image). The text description of the image isn’t displayed at all by the MyLink system, so it’s kind of odd that the encoding type of the text field would prevent the display of the image.
A short bit of coding later and I had a utility that changed the text encoding on the APIC frame of all my MP3’s that I play in the car, and the cover art conundrum is closed.
I’ve been using the iKEY Audio M3+ digital recorder for about 18 months now, and apart from a nasty little gotcha relating to mono recording, I’ve been pretty happy with it. Just recently though, I noticed that I was no longer able to adjust the recording level with the rotating wheel like I used to. I then noticed that, while recordings of speech were still OK, recordings of music sounded terrible. On investigating this today I noticed that while recording the display was showing “AGC” which indicates “Automatic Gain Control”, which would explain why I could no longer manually adjust the input level.
Frustratingly, neither the manual, nor the product’s web site mention anything about AGC or how to turn it on and off. A search of the web revealed that others have had a similar problem. This customer review on Amazon describes how to toggle the AGC mode on an iKey RM3 recorder, but this didn’t work on my M3+ recorder. After a bit of experimentation I found that the steps required for the M3+ recorder are:
It’s been exactly one year since the genesis of this website, and a bit over a month since my exodus from my initial web hosting provider.
After a month with my new web hosting provider I can report … absolutely nothing. Completely uneventful. No problems whatsoever, which is exactly as it should be. I’m currently using the Saver+ Economy Hosting plan from NetVirtue, which at $1.95/month is superb value for a low data, low bandwidth, low importance website like this one.
More for my own benefit than for anyone else, in case I need to do it again, these are the steps I used in migrating my web site from one hosting provider to another, keeping the same domain name. In practice it was a bit more bothersome than what’s described below, as I took a few wrong paths and had to backtrack. The two pages that I found useful in doing the migration were …
In summary, the steps I took were …
One minor obstacle I had in attempting this migration was that after uploading the content to the new server in step 4 above, the front page of the site was working OK, but clicking on any links to content elsewhere resulted in a “404 not found” error.
It turned out that in step 4.B above, when I was uploading the website files, I didn’t upload all the files in the root directory, as I knew that some of them were specific to the old server not the new server. e.g. files like the error log, or config files for the fantastico installer. I got this mostly right but unfortunately one of the files that I thought I didn’t need to upload was “.htaccess” – but as this forum article steered me straight – it is needed. After uploading the “.htaccess” file, the site sprang to life as it should have.
UPDATE 06-Jun-2014
For another WordPress site where I wanted to create a copy of the site for dev/test purposes I used the Duplicator plugin, which was pretty straightforward.
I have just migrated this blog to a new web hosting provider, and if you’re seeing this then it means that it has all worked successfully. Formerly the blog was hosted with “Crazy Domains”, and while they have been mostly OK, in the last year I have been unhappy about a few things.
So here I am with a new web hosting provider, based in Australia. They have a 30 day money back guarantee, so I’ll wait a month before I name them and either praise their prowess, or drub their dysfunction.
Today, 8th April 2014, Microsoft stops support for Windows XP, which is a bit sad. I always had a fondness for Windows XP, being the first decent, stable, consumer operating system from Microsoft. Over time I even got used to the Teletubby themed default wallpaper. I still have 2 PC’s at home running Windows XP and for what they do (basic web browsing, looking at photo’s, watching TV) the OS performs as well now as it did when it was released.
I really don’t want to upgrade to Windows 8, and the hardware on those PC’s would struggle with Windows 8 anyway, so I’m still undecided whether to retire them, replace them, or upgrade them.