Since the beginning of ‘intelligent’ life on Earth, there have been fads. And, as with all things, all fads come to an end. Sometimes, it’s better to cause a fad’s untimely demise rather than let it run its course. Here are two trends on websites that I keep seeing that really need to die.
This is a minor improvement to the previous release of WP Lynx. It fixes a few issues reported by users. These include fixing an issue involving non UTF-8 encoded sites, and a fix for users on hosts with php safemode enabled. Finally, error reporting is improved slightly. As always, if you thing you found a bug please report it.
The next planned release, 0.2.0, will have some cool new features. Additionally, the settings page will be reorganized a little to make it easier to use. More on this as development progresses.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
So today I received an email stating that a plugin of mine is featured in a book about WordPress—I wonder which one it was. After doing a little research I confirmed that the book does, indeed cover Breadcrumb NavXT—the email wasn’t very specific as to which plugin they were talking about, and I almost passed it off as spam.
The book is “WordPress and Flash 10x Cookbook” by Peter Spannagle and Sarah Soward. As the title suggests it covers WordPress and integrating flash elements into it (Yes, I find it odd that Breadcrumb NavXT is in it, but whatever). The section covering Breadcrumb NavXT is in chapter 2, and does a decent job representing it. Though, personally I would have elaborated a little more on it. In particular, I would have been a little more specific in the installation instructions—the provided instructions could lead to a different plugin being installed.
Unfortunately, with the fast pace of software development, the book is sort of out of date (not as bad as a WordPress 2.8 Themes book released this month by the same publisher). Luckily, Breadcrumb NavXT has not changed enough for the instructions in the book to be invalid or misleading. If you are looking for a book on WordPress and Flash you may want to check it out. You can pick up a copy from the usual place (Amazon).
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
It’s really simple. So simple that I felt like an idiot when I did not get it to work right away. If you have a motherboard from Intel’s Extreme or Media series, you probably have CIR headers (some other manufactures have them as well, but it’s rather hit or miss). CIR is an acronym for Consumer InfraRed, is a standard of sorts that allows us to do fun things like turn on our HTPC with a standard IR remote. Best of all (sort of), it doesn’t require a USB adapter.
Yes, you can run BFHCC.exe in Linux under wine. You just need to use some of the Microsoft libraries (OLE32 is just one of many that are needed). If invoked from the same directory as BFHCC.exe resides, it will load your settings just fine. However, it won’t let you warn, kick, or ban players (the pop up menu when right clicking on a player name does not work). Additionally, it runs kinda slow (I am running a 64bit kernel with a 32bit Wine install for compatibility reasons).
The other, somewhat more powerful, Battlefield Heroes server manager, Ness Manager, works perfectly in Linux. Best of all it doesn’t need Wine to run. This is thanks to it being completely written in Java. Naturally, you need a Java run time environment (JRE) installed for this to work. To install it you may need Wine (it’s a .exe installer), but once the files have been installed, you’ll notice they are all .jar files. Copy these to a place you can access easily. To start Ness Manager all you need to do is type java -jar BFHNessManager.jar while in the directory where you have Ness Manager installed in. Ness Manager works exactly as it does in Windows, which is great, and runs fast compared to BFHCC.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]