Category Archives: Software

Tardy

Blogging, Software

The upgrade notification in the WordPress administration area finally got the better of me tonight, I’m now running WordPress 2.6.5.

Not unlike every other WordPress upgrade I’ve performed, the process was fast and painless. For those that haven’t performed one before – you can follow the upgrade instructions on the WordPress Codex and you’ll just sail on through it without a care in the world and if something untoward should happen – you’ll have a backup just in case.

I haven’t checked the release notes for the changes between 2.6.0 and 2.6.5 but I’m positive that there has been some pretty serious improvements in the efficiency of WordPress as the site felt immediately faster. Everything else has kept on working, even my horribly out of date theme and WordPress plugins that I run.

With WordPress 2.7.0 recently being rolled out to http://wordpress.com, I can’t wait for it to land as a general distribution via http://wordpress.org. It has a lot of new features in it and an upgraded user interface which looks very slick – it might just be the catalyst for upgrading in a more timely fashion next time!

Making HP Laserjet Printers Work In Windows Vista

Hardware, Software

I’ve been fighting against Windows Vista to get my HP Laserjet 1010 working for about a month now and finally have a working solution. You’re mileage might vary:

  1. Go to http://www.hp.com and find the driver for your printer. If a direct match isn’t available, see if there is one for the updated version of your printer (in my case, a Laserjet 1012 or a Laserjet 1015). If none of those are available, there are numerous forums that suggest using the Windows XP driver will work as expected, see how you go.
  2. Decompress the drivers you’ve downloaded to a known location on your computer.
  3. Go into Control Panel, Printers and select the Add Printer option.
  4. When the prompt comes up to select the port to connect your printer to, instinctively you would have chosen USB. Don’t ask me why, but even though the printer is connected via a USB connection, you’ll need to select the DOT4 option. I had been choosing the USB option with no success, so if you’re having trouble with your existing driver it might be worth switching it just to see if it fixes your printer problem.
  5. When you get to the vendor/printer screen, select the Have Disk option and navigate to where you decompressed the files to in point 2.
  6. Follow the rest of the wizard though.

I’m currently using the HP provided Laserjet 1012 drivers against my Laserjet 1010. After my new found knowledge of selecting the DOT4 port option, I now suspect that the Microsoft provided driver for the HP Laserjet 1010 would have worked as well.

WordPress Upgrade

Blogging, Software

Just before the end of last year, the team behind WordPress released an update, which was marked as an urgent upgrade for all users. For whatever reason, it’d been quite a long time since I’d updated last – that I’d let this upgrade pass by as well. Not quite sure what made me actually do the upgrade last night but it was such a painless exercise, I’m going to make a point of upgrading in step with the releases of WordPress from now on.

To give you an idea of what is involved in upgrading a copy of WordPress:

  1. Backup my current installation of WordPress
    1. First I downloaded my out dated copy of WordPress, which took about two minutes.
    2. Second I took a backup of the database as well, this took approximately ten minutes as I included everything in the database.
  2. Download the latest and greatest copy of WordPress, takes approximately a minute.
  3. Extract the freshly downloaded WordPress.
  4. Disable any plugins that are running, in case they aren’t compatible with the new version of WordPress.
  5. Set the theme back to the default, in case the current theme had any dependencies on any of the plugins which were active.
  6. Upload the new WordPress files onto the server, takes about two minutes.
  7. Load the web site upgrade file, which upgrades the database schema to the latest version.
  8. Re-enable plugins one by one, making sure they function correctly as you go.
  9. Restore your preferred theme.

After all of the fluffing about, it took about 20 minutes in total and most of that could have been avoided if I chose to only backup selected bits of the database (thus reducing the download size).

As a by product of the upgrade, I have a little house keeping to do around the site. I noticed that one of my WordPress plugins isn’t functioning correctly, since the category management has been completely overhauled since the version I was running. WordPress now supports tagging, which are essentially micro-categories; so it’ll be a bit of an exercise to go back through the last few years of posts and tag them appropriately but it’ll make finding information much easier for users.

HP Laserjet & Windows Vista Driver Support

Hardware, Software

I had heard that the driver support for Windows Vista was a little patchy in places, however I didn’t realise it was just so patchy.

I have a HP Laserjet 1010, which isn’t a new printer by anyones account and I expected that Vista would have picked it up on its own but that wasn’t the case. Some people might take the opportunity to stone Microsoft for not providing a driver out of the box but that isn’t fair in my opinion; you can’t expect them to support every device under the sun.

Off to the Hewlett Packard web site, where I wander my way into the driver download area. I plugin the model number of the printer expecting to see a nice list of drivers for Windows Vista, only to be told that they haven’t released them yet and that I should check back soon.

It could be just me, but when a company like HP don’t provide a driver for one of their staple home/small business printers for Windows Vista six months after it has been released – it isn’t coming anytime soon; in fact it may never come.

Fortunately, Microsoft provide a driver for the Laserjet 1015 which appears to be compatible. It’s lucky really because Hewlett Packard don’t provide a Windows Vista driver for the 1015 either.

Winning The Fight Against Spam

Blogging, Software

I hate spam, I hate it in email, I hate it in paper mail, I hate it in instant messaging, I hate it in forums – I just hate it.

For a long time, I have struggled with comment spam on this site up until I installed Akismet, which has been my knight in shining armour to help combat comment spam.

Over the last year, the rate that this site has been getting spammed has increased every single month, without fail – relentlessly. The spam statistics for the Akismet service indicates that the rate they are receiving and filtering spam has also been increasing.

At the moment, the graph doesn’t show any particular sign that the rate of spam has slowed at all. For some reason though, the rate that this site is receiving spam has definitely decreased. Over the last few months, I would delete between 350 and some times over 1000 per day while at the moment it is averaging a number less than 200.

That got me wondering what has changed around these parts, nothing in particular. I’m still running the same blogging software, still using Akismet to filter spam on the site and the search engine rankings of the site haven’t decreased such that it might make it a less likely target for spammers.

Is it possible that enough people are combating spam efficiently these days that at least some portion of the spamming community have called it quits? I don’t know if there is a way for anyone to answer that question with any sort of certainty however I can only hope that it might be the case.

Die filthy spammers, die.