If you have noticed all your blog images breaking after upgrading to WordPress 3.0 from WordPress MU, you will need to make a simple change to the .htaccess file.

The quickest way to disable autostart of services in Debian is to utilize a convenient curses interface to selectively choose which services to autostart in different run levels. Its so much easier to use than update-rc.d.  Its good for instances where you are migrating services out of an existing box, such as removing the mysql server without uninstalling.

The package is called:
sysv-rc-conf

(Install it using aptitude or apt-get install)

Setting a focus on an input box is a hassle with so many different browsers out there. Each browser has their own unique tag to set the focus. Rather than using the browser-specific tags for the focus, one can utilize Javascript to provide the functionality for multiple browsers.

jQuery is a great alternative to adding the focus since its simply a matter of adding a few lines of code to your page. It will work on multiple browsers, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.

As an administrator for a WordPress MU install, I’ve been getting comments about the RSS feed in WordPress not fetching the latest feeds. The RSS feed information that appears on the page ranges from a fetch that is a few hours to a day old. I’ve confirmed this is an issue with 2.9. This is an issue for blogs that need to pull alerts from an RSS feed within a timely basis, e.g. every 10 minutes.

The workaround to this is to use the KB Advanced RSS feed plugin instead of the one that’s in WordPress.

If you have followed the instructions for renaming your Apple Bluetooth keyboard in OS X and it doesn’t work, the problem is actually an OS X 10.6 bug. I had the original version of OS X Snow Leopard without any patches and can confirm that the “Rename” option in System Preferences->Bluetooth does not exist. To fix, simply upgrade to the latest version of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.3 as of 5/11/2010) They apparently brought back the “Rename” option in a newer version of Snow Leopard.

As a new Mac owner, I recently purchased Final Cut Express 4 to see if I can transition from my Sony Vegas Pro 8 setup on the PC. The Sony Vegas Pro 8 software will run the Canon MTS files natively, which is a very convenient for quickly editing files. As I was importing the files onto the Mac, I noticed that Final Cut Express 4 wasn’t recognizing the video format. It was displaying “Error: Unknown format” messages.

Solution: The workaround is to use iMovie ‘09 to import the video files from the camera. Connect the Canon camcorder to the Mac via …

Reading Excel files in CodeIgniter is actually very easy once you have the right documentation. The first thing you will need to do is utilize the CodeIgniter “Upload” library and add in the Excel Reader library for reading the files. The documentation on the CodeIgniter website in regards to this Excel Reader library is missing some details in implementation. This tutorial will go through the steps of installing the Excel reader library and getting an example implementation working.

The error message looked like:
“Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,COERCIBLE) and (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation ‘find_in_set’”

I ran into this problem today while importing text from a CSV file. Evidently, the text format of the document had UTF characters, which caused CodeIgniter to error out when it tried to insert it to the database. The line had French characters (The ç in Français) My database fields by default are set to “latin1_swedish_ci” character set.

The fix?
I decided the best way to fix this was to set the Collation option for that specific field in the MySQL database to  “utf8_general_ci View More...

If you are in the market for a Canon 7D or a Canon 5D Mark II and a lens, March 7, 2010 – April 3, 2010 is a great time to buy one. Canon is offering 2x the rebates for lenses if you pick up the 5D Mark II at the same time.

Historically, the 580 EX II had a $50 instant rebate during Winter 2009, so the rebate isn’t as good (unless you buy the 5D Mark II at the same time) The $100 off on the 7D looks like a great deal, especially for such a new camera. One of my favorite lenses for indoor use is the 16-35mm, $200 off w/ the 5D II is a good deal.

MySQL by default will make the ORDER BY option in queries case sensitive. This means that rows with the same starting letters (but different case) may be ordered non-alphabetically. There are three solutions to this. One is to force all database entries to be forced to upper-case or lower-case when inserting. Another is to use the collate option. The other solution is to change the query itself.