Originally published in Beatweek Magazine 12/2010. http://www.beatweek.com/iphone/ipodiphoneitunes/7689-review-amplitube-irig-for-ipad-and-iphone/

Looking for a way to play the guitar while travelling or a way to play guitar without waking up your neighbors? Enter the IK Multimedia AmpliTube iRig, an instrument adapter for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices. Setup is easy as plugging in your guitar instrument cable and headphones to the iRig and running a guitar app. The adapter features a quality 1/8” cable connected to an input for a ¼” instrument cable and a headphone output jack.

I tried running the iRig with the free version of AmpliTube, which simulates a guitar …

Here’s a quick fix for WordPress 2.X to WordPress 3.X migration:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare wp_load_image() (… previously declared in /wp-includes/media.php) in /wp-admin/includes/image.php …)

What causes this? The primary cause is a plugin inside /wp-content/plugins folder that is incompatible with WordPress 3.0. Most likely the plugin developer defined a wordpress function inside their plugin folder, causing a function name redeclaration.

The best free Windows HTML image map tool I’ve found is XMap. I found it easy to use for some of my client’s websites that use image maps for site navigation. Very simple Windows install.

http://www.carlosag.net/Tools/XMap/

Is your Debian install of Tomcat 5.5 not working with your Webapp?

Just a heads up for anyone with problems trying to get webapps working with Debian. I highly recommend installing Tomcat 6.0 from source. It helped clear a number of issues for me. Debian only supports Tomcat 5.5 in their package management system. I could have gone with unstable to get Tomcat 6.0, but I prefer not to deal with their folder organization layout (see below)

Here are a few resources I’ve used to install Tomcat 6.0 in Debian Lenny.

1. How to Install Tomcat 6 in Debian Lenny. This is an excellent step-by-step tutorial. A+ in my book.

2. http://www.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/ Connector/J, MySQL JDBC Connector download.

3. http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/jndi-datasource-examples-howto.html. Tomcat 6.0 configuration with MySQL Connector/J JDBC.

Upon updating Webmin, I noticed that there is a new package dependency that breaks the updates.

To fix, you will need to get the phpini package from Webmin http://www.webmin.com/standard.html and extract the folder to your Webmin system folder. In Debian, its located in /usr/share/webmin/   This should also apply to any other Webmin packages that are missing from your system.

I’ve been looking for a replacement camera ever since my Canon Powershot SD790 experienced its first “Lens Error. Restart camera” problem. One of my favorite features in the camera is the time lapse, where a photo is taken every few seconds and merged into a video. Unfortunately, this feature is no longer offered.

Here is a list of Canon Cameras with the time lapse feature:

G9, SD750, SD770 IS, SD790 IS, SD850 IS, SD870 IS, SD890 IS, SD950 IS, SD1000, and SD1100 IS.

There are two options if you want to still do …

New firmware update for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR has been released. All of the changes appear to be bugfixes for the camera.

This firmware update (Version 2.0.8) incorporates the following changes and fixes.

1. Fixes a phenomenon in which movies are not taken at the shooting mode registered in the user’s settings if a shooting mode Aperture priority (or Shutter priority) is registered in any of the camera’s user settings (C1, C2, C3) and the user attempts to shoot a movie.
2. Fixes a phenomenon in which the shutter will not release when pressing the shutter button when the auto power off …
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The closing keynote at Blogworld 2010 had an all star lineup of comedians, executives, and web celebs. Featured were Penn Jillette, Adam Carolla, Rob Barnett (CEO of MyDamnChannel), Jeff Hayzlett (“The Mirror Test” author), GeekBeat.Tv host Cali Lewis, and Mark Malkoff. Kudos to Rick Calvert and Dave Cynkin for putting together another great conference.

The format of the keynote was very entertaining since it was like a talk show. Here’s some photos of the keynote that I took. All I ask is to credit [@dragonal - albertech.net] if you plan to use them in your …

Scponly is used for chroot to limit server access for SSH and SFTP users. Unfortunately, the Debian package for scponly does not work with Debian 5.0.

If you upgraded from Debian 4 to Debian 5 and are using scponly, you may notice that the clients are unable to connect. Possible error messages include:

• “failed WinSCP compatibility mode” error message
• WinSCP closes unexpectedly after authenticating
• Connection failure after successful authentication
• Client logs two attempts to connect to the /home/username home directory before failing

Adobe’s Flash player is known to store cookies on your computer, independent of your web browser settings. So, if you have Firefox deleting all the cookies after your session, you may still have additional tracking cookies on your computer via Flash.

 In some cases, these cookies can be good depending on the website. For instance, setting the volume of the Flash plugin for a particular website. Other cases, they could be used for targeted advertising.