The folks over at Instinct Entertainment released WP e-Commerce 3.6.6 today and received not so great feedback from users. Looks like 3.6.6 is a bit buggy. Sadly, this does not surprise me one bit. Take a look at the code, and try to grasp what is going on.
A year ago I muddled around, and hacked an older version of it (was the newest version at the time) apart for a client of mine. At the time the code was a nightmare to navigate. This spring when they wanted to add more features, some of which were in the newer 3.6 branch, I did some research on the changes between versions. Sadly, things have not gotten better (code organization wise).
Right now, WP e-Commerce is not open source. It however, is the only solution for users that want to use Authorize.net. The client that I made the modifications to WP e-Commerce for at one point proposed just making our own plug-in. Since I personally do not have an interest in establishing a e-commerce site, I will not spontaneously produce a e-commerce plug-in.
Should such a competing plug-in be released by me a few things can be guaranteed about it.
- Fully commented source, just about every line will have an explanation, functions commented properly, with explanations of their prototypes.
- Full (and proper) i18n (internationalization) support in accordance with the WordPress i18n guidelines.
- Utilizes the WordPress API when appropriate.
- Clean, fast code that is object oriented when appropriate.
- Highly modular, easy to remove unwanted/unneeded features. Items included in the HTML head are reduced to only what is needed.
- Predictable release time line similar to that of Breadcrumb NavXT and WordPress. Monthly bug fix releases, new features released the same month as a WordPress “major release” (e.g. 2.2, 2.3, 2.5 were major releases), or every three to four months (I try to keep bug fix releases fixed to three or four max).
- 100% Open Source licensed under the GNU GPL2.
Numbers 1,2,3,6 and 7 would be there from the get-go. The fifth one would be introduced in time, and the fourth would be an ongoing thing. Development would begin as .1 and not follow any particular time line for releases until 1.0 is reached. By 1.0 it would be stable, though by .8 or so it’d be a suitable replacement to WP e-Commerce.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Spring semester week #1 is complete. My schedule this semester is much better than the previous semester’s. No more late afternoon classes, no more huge blocks of time between classes. This semester we play with the idiotic PIC microcontroller specifically due to it’s illogical command set, slip ups in its documentation, and other general oddities in it. That’s correct, we’re studying a microcontroller architecture that even the professor does not and would not use. An interesting general conclusion about the different departments/colleges at the U is that the CLA and biology departments tend to use more Macs, while IT likes either dells running Ubuntu, XP 64bit or Sun workstations running Ubuntu or Solaris. Having a professor that out right makes fun of Windows is a new experience, and actively trying to promote Linux is definitely new. Since his laptop’s gnome environment distinctly lacked distribution branding (as seen on Ubuntu and others), I’m sure he’s probably a Slackware user (which is cool since Ubuntu is overrated and Slackware originated in Minnesota). Though, I must say, I don’t approve of his favorite text editor (vi) and no I don’t even use its main competitor (EMACS), I’m a Gentoo user (hence I use nano).
Just a side note, I did a minor update to Breadcrumb NavXT. It should provide with some debugging information in know problem areas, and the “Bad user, no cookie for you” error message was replaced with something a bit more descriptive. Hopefully, the cause of the break in the WordPress API which causes the message to show up can be identified. Currently, it seems that running PHP in safemode can cause the problem to arise. More on that later.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Back into the Gentoo partition this evening, and things are great. The ATI driver automagically began working again, after not working when reinstalling it after a run with the open-source driver. So I updated that to the latest, before I was only getting 50 – 100 FPS with glxgears, now I get about 500 to 600 FPS with glxgears on my Radeon 9600, talk about an improvement. Now only if October’s driver would come sooner so I can have Compiz fusion running with out XGL.
After fixing the graphics issues, I moved on to getting the shared printer on mtekktux to connect on my computer, that didn’t require much effort either. Just a quick configuration of CUPS, and updating HPLIP, setting the printer as default, and Kablam! printing works.
Now came the annoying sound issues. In particular, if alsasound is not started your previous gmixer settings get lost in Gnome (probably the same way with KDE). Fixing this is simple, just add alsasound to the default run level using rc-update add alsasound default. Now on boot alsasound will launch restoring settings from the previous session (that’s if it is configured to do so, which it is by default). As things have gone good so far, I plugged in my Logitech Music Anyware USB wireless audio device. Running cat /proc/asound/cards revealed:
1 [Tra ]: USB-Audio - Logitech Music Anywhere USB Tra
Logitech Logitech Music Anywhere USB Tra at usb-0000:00:1d.2-1, full speed
ALSA found it! So it was time to test to see if it works, and sure enough it does. The remote doesn’t work (yet), but that’s because Audacious doesn’t hook into the multimedia hotkey functions yet. For something that does not claim Linux support, having the major function of it work is success by any standard.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
It sounds like AMD will follow Intel’s lead in opening up their graphics processors for open source driver development. Today they released full specifications, no strings attached (in the form of NDAs that is). This comes after last week’s announcement that the new fglrx will offer a major improvement in performance for Linux users. As my computer has a obsolete Radeon 9600, I await the day when running Compiz Fusion is possible without the use of that ugly beast known as XGL. That date is set for October should I decide to stick with the fglrx driver. Hopefully by Christmas the open-source driver will be a truly viable option (I spent three days trying to get it to work with my 9600 with no luck).
On a side note, I received over a terabyte worth of hard drives plus other computer components. This time a good portion of the drives are 7200 RPM, and I now have a back-up motherboard (exact same model as my current). Ideally, I’ll add a 250GB hard drive to mtekktux to supplement it’s 80GB drive to turn it into a media and print server. Then I’ll replace my 160GB 5400 RPM hard drive with a 250 GB 7200RPM one for my XP drive, that should shorten the load times for maps in 2142.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
A while back while reading a tutorial by Nick La of N.Design Studio, I thought the concept of what his tutorial covered in Adobe Illustrator was cool. Of course using Illustrator is not an option when running in a GNU/Linux environment, this is where Inkscape comes into play. Much like the GIMP, Inkscape does not do everything that its Adobe competitor does. Thus, abiding strictly to Nick’s tutorial is impossible, but getting to the same end result is possible. In the coming weeks I will post a supplement to Nick’s tutorial for the use in Inkscape. However, right now I’m introducing the end result of my Inkscape experimentation, Gentoo Blue Wave. This is a 1080p resolution wallpaper that abides to the Tango pallet. This is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
WordCamp NYC
