Technology
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
by George Appiah
MediaMax, the online storage company that just recently relaunched as The LinkUp (and which I recently bashed for screwing free users during the transition) is finally throwing in towel and closing up for good.
While I’ve STILL not gotten over losing my data, I’m in no way rejoicing over their demise. Being an entrepreneur myself (at least I like to make-believe so), I’m all too familiar with the ups and downs that go into running a business.
And I always have so much respect for the people who decide to take this route, even if, like me, they fail so many times on the way. My heart to the founders, and wish them good luck in the next venture.
Here’s a copy of the closure mail they passed along to all users on the 10th of July:
MediaMax / The Linkup is closing
We regret to inform you that we will be closing The Linkup service on Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.
Please login to your account and download any files that you wish to keep before Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.
The Linkup is no longer accepting any uploads or new accounts, and no further charges will be made to your credit card. After August 8, your account will not be accessible, all your personal information will be deleted (username, billing information, history, etc), and your files will be deleted.
It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers. We are very sorry that we have not been able to continue our service as we had envisioned.
Sincerely,
The Linkup Team
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
by George Appiah
I’ve been battling with a Spin Of Death problem on my MacBook anytime I start Firefox 3, and today, as a last resort, I completely removed Firefox including my user profile.
Problem was, I didn’t remember any of my passwords stored in Password Manager. And when I tried resetting my password on one website running WordPress 2.5.1, I was greeted with a friendly “Invalid Activation Key” message whenever I clicked on the confirmation mail.
No matter how many times I tried, I always had the “invalid activation key” problem.
Digging around the WordPress support forums, I discovered this is a known bug in WordPress 2.5.1, and has already been fixed in Ticket #6842.
If you’ve also encountered this “invalid key” problem while trying to reset your WordPress 2.5.1 password, here is how to (hopefully) fix it:
First, Apply The Patch
Head over to Ryan McCue’s Blog, grab his patched files (zipped file containing two files: wp-login.php and wp-includes/pluggable.php), and upload them to your WordPress installation directory, overwriting the existing files.
Alternatively… and this is only for the really adventurous… you can upgrade to WordPress 2.6 Beta 2 to enjoy all those cool new feature. Sure, this is beta and it’s not ready yet, but I’ve been running both the first and second betas with no issues at all. Yet.
Hopefully you should be able to generate a password after applying the patch. But if you still get the “invalid key” message…
Clear The Activation Key From “wp-users” Table
For some users, just applying the above ptch will fix this problem. But for others (myself included), this patch appears not to help at all.
But this patch actually works… except it appears that if the “wp_users” table already contains an activation key, it is not cleared before a new one is generated after installing the patch; thus, the patch appears to not work.
This seems to be the case even after upgrading to WordPress 2.6 Beta 2.
So what you gonna’ do? After installing the patch, you need to manually dig into the WordPress database and remove any activation key from the wp_users table and try the password reset again. You can do this by using your database management tool such as phpMyAdmin.
This worked for me, and I hope it works for you too. As always, just let me know if you need help with this… I’d be grad to help you.
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
by George Appiah
After Google’s DoubleClick acquisition and the recent announcement of the Google Affiliate Network program, it was generally expected that there would be some major shakeup in search giant’s cashcow AdWords/AdSense duet.
Well, the first (with possible more to come) is here already. Today AdSense publishers received a “mandatory” mail from Google, announcing the retirement of their AdSense Referrals program.
For those not familiar with Google’s advertising programs for publishers, the AdSense Referrals Program allows website publishers to earn money by referring users to advertisers’ products and services.
But unlike the traditional AdSense Pay Per Click program which pays for each single (valid) click, with Referrals publishers earn only when visitors they refer perform some specific action pre-determined by the advertiser… such as making a purchase, completing a form to receive more information, entering a sweepstakes, etc.
Below is a copy of the mail. Time to hunt and remove all those adds 
Hello,
Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program. We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:
- Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
- AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.
If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:
- Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your
ad space.
- Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information
Why is this happening?
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882
Sincerely.
The Google AdSense Team
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
by George Appiah
When my sister was returning to her books and husband (in that order ) in the United States after coming down home to pass a kid down the factory line (don’t tell her I said that!), she left a PC here with lots of her personal data on it.
After promising and procrastinating for well over a year, I decided, today, to upload her stuff to an online storage account for her — so she could download them to her computer (I know she’s not the “hang all your panties online” sort of person.)
So I went over to Mediamax (which I must confess, I’ve not used for quite some time), pulled out my account details from Gmail … and see what I found (all emphasis mine):
So I clicked over to The Linkup, and of course, I couldn’t log in. The password retrieval tool even told me my email address is not in their system.
Sure, my account was a free account. And there maybe a clause buried somewhere in their TOS that says that all free users who don’t log into their account after x number of days would be kicked out (which like you, I never bothered to read).
Who knows? That’s why I really want to give them the benefit of my doubt — and just make believe that the issue with my account may be a random one… some bug or something that occurred during the transition.
But with statements like what’s above, I’m left with no choice but to conclude that they kicked out all free users during the transition from Mediamax to The Screwup Linkup.
Have I contacted them? Nope. And I’m not going to. I really didn’t have anything I couldn’t afford to lose in there. So no back-and-forth communication is worth my while. And oh, I do multiple backups with different online services.
I’m still waiting for GDrive to arrive, if it ever will. For now I’ve created a new Mozy account that I’m using to backup the girl’s data so she can grab them.
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
by George Appiah
Have you ever tried to delete a folder containing many files from your web hosting account using an FTP client? It seems to take forever, right? Here’s how you could make it faster.
But first, why is it so slow — even though you have this super duper broadband Internet connection?
Sure, faster Internet connection never hurts, but the main issue here is the number of files you’re deleting. Your FTP software sends the necessary command that tells your FTP server to delete a file — for EACH of the files, and then wait for acknowledgment that the file has been deleted (or not), before moving on to the next file.
Granted, all this hand-shaking takes place in the split of a second. But if you’re deleting a folder containing 100, 500, or even 1000 or more files, those seconds quickly add up!
So how can you make it faster?
These days nearly all web hosting companies have some sort of web-based control panel (eg cPanel, Plesk, Helm, DirectAdmin, etc) for their clients to manage their account online. If your hosting account comes with cPanel, here is how to quickly delete a folder, no matter how many files may be contained in it, using cPanel’s File Manager:
First, login to your cPanel and click on File Manager. This should open a new browser window, so if you click on it and nothing happens, be sure to check your pop-up blocker.
From File Manager, you will see a number of files and directories (folders) listed. To open a particular folder, click on the ICON to the left of the folder (not the folder’s name!).
After navigating to the particular folder you want to delete, click on the Folder’s name. This will present a set of options to the upper-right corner of your screen, one of which is the option to delete the folder.
One cool thing about cPanel is … just like with your desktop computer, deleting a file / folder does not immediately erase it from your system. Rather it keeps it in a Trash can, from where you can restore it, in case you change your mind later.
If you have a different control panel other than cPanel, the process may not be that different. Read your control panel’s manual for the specific instructions.
And if you’ve got a question about managing your hosting account, don’t hesitate to contact me: I’m always here to help. Leave a comment below, shoot me an e-mail, call, text, IM or leave a voicemail, or or head over to the Chat Room for a live discussion.
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
by George Appiah
If you’re a Mac OS X user using services like Justin.TV, Ustream, Stickam, etc to stream video online, you could be burning your machine without even being aware of it. There is a nasty bug in Adobe Flash Player 9 for Mac OS X which makes your CPU go crazy.
I discovered this while testing various online video streaming services that use the Adobe Flash Player. I observed my CPU quickly crank up anytime I started to stream content for all the services I tried, so it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t an issue with the service provider.
Probing further, I realized this problem didn’t affect my Windows and Linux boxes: obviously Mac OS X and Flash 9 (the version of flash I was using) don’t get along that well when streaming.
Interestingly, the bug seem to affect only the audio: disabling the audio (while streaming video) brought the CPU usage to normal level, while disabling the video (with audio only streaming) shot the CPU usage right backup gain.
There is no fix for this issue yet, but here is a simple way to go around the problem: simply upgrade your version of Adobe Flash Player to the latest version, Flash 10.
But keep in mind that Adobe Flash Player Flash 10 is still a beta software and is potentially unstable. That said, I’ve been running it continuously for more than 24 hours, and have not had any issues with it. Yet. Within this period, I’ve had both Safari and Firefox crash two or three times each
Here’s what to do to get Adobe Flash Player 10 running on your machine …
First, head over to CNET’s Version Tracker website and download the latest version of Flash 10. As of this writing, he latest version available for download was 10.0.1.218.
Note that Adobe requires that you uninstall any prior installed versions of Flash Player before you install the version 10 beta! You’ll find the link to download the Adobe Flash Player Uninstaller from the Version Tracker website.
Hope this solves your CPU overload issues while streaming audio content with Adobe Flash Player on Mac OS X. If you have any question about this, don’t hesitate to ask: I’m here for you. Leave a comment, or come over to the Chat Room for a live conversation.
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
by George Appiah
Ayub, a friend from Uganda, wrote to me yesterday for help with his blog:
Please come to my rescue. I tried upgrading my blog by deleting the files and uploading new WP files and folders. It upgraded, Yes BUT now, It has dropped the Side bar to the bottom of the page.
I checked his blog with all the browsers I have installed on my MacBook, but I didn’t find this problem he reported. I even used Browsershots to test the site in 63 different browser / OS combinations — but I didn’t find any problem either.
So I supposed he must have fixed it himself.
However, I found that all his images were missing! That made me immediately suspect he had deleted them while upgrading his blog. I asked him, and this is what he wrote back:
Thanks for the quick turn around. That 2nd last paragraph [referring to my mail to him] about not removing the WP-Content folder made me smile. I realy felt like I was talking to you face to face. It is so like your usual statement Thanks.
—- snip — snip —
Yes, I deleted everything, including the WP-Content folder.
Wow, I thought as much!
So which directories (aka folders) and files should you actually replace when upgrading WordPress? Which ones should you leave alone?
The short answer is: replace everything, except one file (wp-config.php) and one folder (wp-content). I also suggest you actually delete all the other files and folders and upload the new ones, instead of simply overwriting them.
And now for the long answer…
WordPress is a database-driven content management system. Mouthful eh? That simply means all the text that you sweat to write are not stored within the WordPress files you install.
Rather, they are stored in the database. Remember you had to supply some MySQL database name, username and password at the time you were installing WordPress? Right — that’s where all your articles you write are stored.
However, all your media files (photos, audio, video, pdf files, etc) that you upload when writing articles are stored (by default) in a folder called uploads in the wp-content folder. Your WordPress theme and all plugins your’re using are also stored in this same wp-content folder.
So unless you want to totally clear your blog and start over on a fresh, blank note, leave this directly alone when you’re upgrading WordPress.
Also, the information that allows WordPress to connect to your database to display your articles are stored in the file named wp-config.php. Don’t delete this file as well.
And most importantly, always, always, ALWAYS… do a complete backup of your WordPress blog before starting any upgrade.
By “complete backup” I mean backup your database and all WordPress files and directories — including wp-content and wp-config.php. This way, you can easily restore your WordPress blog to its previous state in case something goes wrong during the upgrade.
If you’ve got a question about upgrading your WordPress blog, I’m always here to help. Leave a comment below, shoot me an e-mail, call, text, IM or leave a voicemail, or or head over to the Chat Room for a live discussion.
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
by George Appiah
Can a new wine skin save an old wine that’s going bad? San Jose, Silicon Vally, based Mercury News seem to think so, with the launch of their new Mercury News e-Edition.
This morning I woke up to find a mail from Mercury News with a “special announcement” about this great new service — a complete re-production of the print paper online.
The mail itself seem to have been sent by a toddler who spent so much time playing with his toys and didn’t have enough time to finish editing the template. [Seen those newsletter / website templates with text like "Your Company Name Here" sort of thing?]. But I digress. Here’s the gist of the mail:
Special Announcement:
Today, we are announcing the launch of the Mercury News e-Edition. The e-Edition is not just a website. It’s every story, picture, and ad exactly as it appears on every page. And, you’ll be able to do things you can’t do with the print edition, such as:
- Get Silicon Valley news by viewing our four daily editions
- View our free 30-day archive to view news you’ve missed
- Get print content NOT available on MercuryNews.com
- Search the Mercury News with advanced search tools
- Enlarge the type for easier reading
Here’s a screen shot (click image for for bigger one), and you can try the demo of this new service here.
This service costs US$15 for a “7-day, 5-week e-Edition subscription” and if you ask me, that’s pretty steep. Granted, I don’t live in San Jose or even in the United States to know how these people love their newspaper ads to want to pay for it, and this was obviously not built for me.
But I checked out the demo all the same and I wasn’t impressed at all.
The main problem here is that of navigation. First it’s no fun reading those tiny columns on screen. After figuring out the fairly complicated navigation system, folks like me with tiny screens will have to continually be scrolling left and right to read the content of a page.
Oh, and where is page 65 that this article continues from? Hello?
The scanned text was also really painful on my eyes. Unfortunately, increasing the text size completely breaks the columnar layout, turning it into a regular linear web page. So why the hassle?
Will advertisers have to pay more because their ads are getting online? In any case, what’s the value to be gained from online ads that are not linked to any landing page?
As I’ve said, I don’t live in the United States, so I may be missing the point of this new service entirely. That probably explains why I don’t get this either:
Missed some news during the week? Catch up during your free time when you can relax. With the e-Edition, you have access to our 30-day archive. You can quickly and easily review the news & ads you otherwise would have missed. Take a test drive and view a demo here
Wow. So people really miss ads? Not me.
Now I was convinced this was not for me, so I just had to unsubscribe. So I scroll down to the bottom of the mail, and hit the link that says “Manage Your Subscriptions (to unsubscribe from this mailing)”. And what do I get?
What? But I only wanted to unsubscribe? Naturally, I went the far easier route: which was to hit the Spam button.
But seriously I’m interested in knowing what value proposition (beyond going back to missed ads ) that such a content format would offer. Who are the likely audiences for something like this? Share your thoughts below.
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
by George Appiah
I’m finally taking the plunge and getting into live video! I’ll primarily be using this medium to provide technical support online, and I’m looking for an online video service to use. I know of a whole lot of them there, and a personal recommendation would be appreciated.
My primary needs are:
- Extreme bandwidth efficiency, as I’m on a pretty slow ADSL connection
- Ability to broadcast without recording: who cares about archives of me just sitting and staring at the screen?
- I’d also like to add pre-recorded video AND audio into the stream
- Integrated chatting service
- Ability to customize player with own branding
- Would be great if the service can also toast bread and do the laundry, but that’s not an absolute necessity
Please post your recommendations in the comment form on this post, or (better) via Twitter @GeorgeAppiah — either way, don’t forget to add what makes you swear by the service you’re recommending.
Anyone?
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
by George Appiah
Imagine you’re at the biggest consumer electronics show in the world to demo the next fancy gadget from your company. In the previous night you tested and retested and retested some more… just to be sure everything works ok.
And then just when you start your demo, the TV/LCD screen goes dark. Grrrr. After fidgeting around with buttons, somehow the screen comes back! But you’re not really sure what just happened. You continue your demo…. and moments later, the screen goes off again. And on and off and on and off, with almost rehearsed consistency.
Well, that’s exactly what the kids at Gizmodo, the popular gadget blog, did during the recently ended CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Armed with the TV-B-Gone kit from The Maker Store, these guys just went crazy and kept turning off one screen after another… even during presentations and demos.
And their reason? Just for the fun of it!. Watch a video from their website here.
Below is the TV-B-Gone kit they used. This is a high-power, open source kit version of the popular TV-B-Gone invented by Mitch Altman. If you want to play with this yourself, you can buy the unassembled kit for less than 30 bucks from The Maker Store, and assemble it yourself.
