Technology

Flickr blog I discovered the Peephole fish eye group. The idea is simple: us a $5 door peephole to give your camera a fisheye lens. Here are the instructions:

1. Hold peephole against rim of camera lens.
2. Set camera to “macro”. (the image is actually displayed on the inside face of the convex lens of the peephole. The camera must focus on the foreground image rather than the background image.)
3. Zoom in to the point that the viewable “circle” is framed almost evenly.
4. For best results, brighter lighting will avoid unwanted noise (grain)
5. Enjoy and have fun.

You can buy a pricier model with the Lomo label on it (and if you go looking, you’ll find a “peephole reverser” which is probably useless for your photography…probably). Henry Gordon Dietz offers a lot more info.

Above is my first experiment with a peephole fisheye and my cheap video camera.

Amazon calls it CloudFront, and it costs $0.17 – $0.22 per GB at the lowest usage tiers. It seems that you simply put your files in an S3 container, make an API call to share them, then let your users enjoy the lower-latency, higher performance service.

Their domestic locations include sites in Virginia, Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey, Washington, and Missouri. Internationally, they’ve got Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo covered.

Supposedly this is more real than it looks. See how it was made.

After writing the project page for wpSMS I didn’t have much more to say in a blog post announcing it. The cool thing about writing Pages in WordPress is that I can create a taxonomy like /projects/wpsms/ to place them in. The downside is that new pages never appear in the RSS feed.

So I need both the page and a blog post to announce it. I could have simply copied the content from the wpSMS page into a blog post, but that creates confusion and splits the audience between the two pages. Instead, I’m using two bSuite features: the [inclu``de] shortcode and the post redirection support.

1. Create the page.
2. Start a new post.
   1. In the post body put the include shortcode like this: [inclu``de post_id="123" field="post_content"].
   2. In the custom fields put an entry with the key: “redirect” and the full URL to to your page.
3. Relax, you’re done.

The include shortcode will copy all the content from the page (so you don’t have to manage it twice), and the redirect custom field will tell bSuite to redirect anybody trying to read that post to your page.

I really don’t like having sendmail running on a webserver, but some features of WordPress just don’t work if it can’t send email (user registration, for example). Still, WordPress offers support to send email through external SMTP servers instead if a local mailer.

In <a href="http://trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/2.6.3/wp-includes/pluggable.php">/wp-includes/pluggable.php</a> around line 377, change

to

Then, in <a title="/tags/2.6.3/wp-includes/class-phpmailer.php - WordPress Trac - Trac" href="http://trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/2.6.3/wp-includes/class-phpmailer.php">/wp-includes/class-phpmailer.php</a> around line 155, set your SMTP host:

You may also need to set a username and password, and tell WP to attempt authentication. You’ll see those in the lines below the hostname variable.

On the other hand, you could do this via a plugin, perhaps even Callum McDonald’s WP Mail SMTP.

It may be a sign that none of the core WordPress developers much likes or uses Microsoft Office, but the core code hasn’t been updated to recognize the Office 2007 file extensions like .docx, .pptx, or .xlsx. It’s no criticism, wouldn’t have discovered it if a user hadn’t complained, and I stewed a bit before deciding it was a bug.

It’s now ticket #8194 in the WordPress.org Trac. It only affects my MU users now, though, and the same patch works there.

You’ll find a few mentions of doc, ppt, and xls in wp-includes/functions.php (around lines 1613-1615 and 1651-1654 in 2.6.3). Once corrected, those lines should look something like this:

Update: Sweet! It’s been accepted and should be in the WP2.7 release.

wp-edu, the WordPress for education mail list has launched. Join up, catch up on the archives, and set it up at your school.

I stumbled on them by accident, but once I discovered Subversion supports action hooks that can fire before or after a transaction, I knew exactly what to do with them.

I’ve wanted a Wikipedia API for a while. Now I might’ve stumbled into one: commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php. It doesn’t do exactly what I want, but it might yet be useful.

GPL and CC are incompatible? FSF says so, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines agree. I’m as opposed to ruinous compromises as the next guy, and I feel the GPL fever, but I just want to use Mark James‘ excellent Silk Icons in my GPL’d WordPress plugin.

Who’d a thunk it: CSSHttpRequest is a way of doing cross-domain AJAX by using CSS’ @import method to fetch the data.

I’ve linked to Steve Sauders‘ webcasts on website performance optimization before. Here’s another. Turns out that he’s co-chairing the O’Reilly Velocity conference in June.

I’ve configured Apache for virtual hosting on more sites than I can count, but I’ve always just kind of stumbled through until now. What’s changed? The Apache 2.2 documentation is worlds better than the old 1.3 docs (even though the old docs rank highest in Google). So here they are: name-based virtual hosts, plus virtual host configuration examples (including an example mixed name and IP virtual hosting, which is what I needed), and some tips on dynamically configured mass virtual hosting.

WP 2.6 allows sites to move the wp-content directory around, so plugin developers like me can’t depend on them being in a predictable location. We can look to the WP_CONTENT_DIR and WP_PLUGIN_DIR constants for answers, but a better solution is likely to use the X_url() functions. The most useful of those is likely to be plugins_url(). Even better, you can give these functions a relative path and they’ll return a fully qualified URL to the item.

Is xFruits a worthy replacement for Yahoo! Pipes?

I just submitted a trac ticket about this:

The update_post_meta() and delete_post_meta() functions don’t know how to deal with post revision IDs. add_post_meta() does, it uses the following block of code to make sure the passed $post_id is a real post, not a revision:

This is important because the global $post_id when a post is being saved is for the revision, not the real post. If you pass that to these functions, update_post_meta() and delete_post_meta() will try to update or delete the records related to the revision. When update_post_meta() fails to find any records for the post_id you submitted, it calls add_post_meta(). Each attempt at updating the meta will actually create a new row in the table.

For now I’m checking with wp_is_post_revision() before making any calls to the post_meta functions.

Updated: Mark Jaquith committed the patch less than two hours after I submitted it! I love WP.