The Most Useless Feature

Tech Problems Comments Off

I went to help a friend of ours with their computer today.  Somehow, her Windows screen was flipped 180 degrees.

This is the most worthless feature ever.  I cannot think of one single use for this feature.  This lady is in her 60’s and I know full well that she never went into her video display settings and rotated the screen 180 degrees.  She has no idea how to get into that area - so somehow this setting turned itself on…

Just because you can build in a feature doesn’t mean that you really should build that feature.  Even if you build in a feature like this - shouldn’t have have an "Are you sure?" prompt before it becomes a locked setting????

Search engine, index thyself…

Tech Problems Comments Off

For those of you who don’t know, a group of ex-Google employees started their own search engine titled "cuil".  So, some of my websites aren’t indexed by cuil - it’s a new search engine, so I don’t expect every site to be in there now.  In order to fix that, I wanted to submit my sites to their crawlers.  There isn’t an easy way to do this right off the homepage, so I did a very simple search "add url to cuil" thinking this would result in me finding my answer.

Cuil

Whoops!  I found FOUR, count them FOUR, results.  Just to see the results, I went to Google and typed in the same search phase and found 75,800 results. 

Search engine, index thyself…

Upgrade to WordPress 2.6

Tech Problems Comments Off

I lost several hours today upgrading from WordPress 2.5 to 2.6.  I followed all of the installation instructions to the letter, but kept getting the following error message:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by....

After installing the new files and then uploading the old wp-config.php file, I was beating my head into the wall. 

WordPress 2.6

Finally, after debugging through things, I found that the WP 2.5 wp-config file has an extra newline character (’\n’) at the end of the %> tag.  Completely undetectable, I lost hours trying to solve the problem.  It appears that 2.5 was either more forgiving or there was some extra code in 2.6 that caused a problem with the extra newline.

I’m just posting this just in case anyone else runs into trouble - check the end of the wp-config.php file for any extra newline characters.