Kolbu

Displays N first news items from a selectable Google News RSS feed, inline or as a widget.

Google aggregates news from over 4500 news sources, updated continously. The results can be retrieved as a number of RSS feeds, where you can create your own specific feed by specifying one of more than 40 regions/languages, and an optional topic ranging from Domestic to Most Popular to Entertainment. Currently there are nine topics, including, of course, All. In addition to this, any feed can be filtered through a search query so that only news items matching your query will be shown. Note that not all combinations of region/language and topic has been enabled by Google but it should degrade gracefully.

This plugin works both as a widget, as inline content replacement and can be used in themes. It can be used as both simultaneously, but there can be only one instance of the widget. Multiple feeds can be configured and used accordingly.

NOTE! Always upgrade to the latest version if you experience problems, most things are fixed already.

The latest version is 2.2.

If you’ve configured feeds that use character sets like cyrillic, arabic and you’re getting errors from WP when trying to view the feeds then your WP MySQL database tables may be created with the wrong character set. Let me know and I’ll give you some pointers.

Download Google News plugin

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You have a nice living room, with a stereo to match. And you have all your CDs ripped in the format of your choice and stored on a server somewhere in the house. Or perhaps you have a decent iTunes collection, or think Pandora is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But actually getting the sound to your stereo in a convenient manner has been somewhat elusive. PC by the stereo? Low WAF, and there is the small matter of where to put the screen and the keyboard. Roku Soundbridge or the old SlimDevices Squeezebox? Three line LCD panels aren’t really readable from the couch. Laptop by the sofa? Doable, but very overkill. Sonos? Better check that lottery ticket first.

If that problem sounds familiar, then just buy a Logitech Squeezebox Duet Network Music System. It Just Works and problem solved. If you’re not convinced, see the Logitech Squeezebox Duet-link in the Pages-menu on the right for more information.

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CNN has a number of RSS feeds with current news available, on a number of topics.

This plugin works both as a widget, as inline content replacement and can be used in themes. It can be used as all three simultaneously, but there can be only one instance of the widget. Multiple feeds can be configured and used accordingly. Clicking on a news item will of course take you straight to the relevant article at CNN, as per CNN Terms of Use.

I know there are generic RSS feed widgets out there, but I figured with so many CNN feeds they warranted their own widget with easier configuration than your average generic RSS widget.

NOTE! Always upgrade to the latest version if you experience problems, most things are fixed already.

The latest version is 2.2.

Download CNN News plugin

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Very simple widget plugin that shows the NASA Image Of The Day thumbnail and a few words of text. Clicking on the thumbnail opens the correct NASA page for a larger image and accompanying text. The plugin now uses a NASA RSS feed for information. No local storage needed, the feed and image is fetched every time. Does anyone need caching here?

Installation instructions:
Unzip in wp-content/plugins directory, enable plugin and then use as any other WordPress widget.

Download NASA Image Of The Day plugin

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Moving this site from WordPress 2.3.3 to 2.5RC2 was largely uneventful. But I recommend waiting until there is a properly scripted upgrade path before you try unless you’re comfortable with MySQL restores and the occational PHP hacking to get a particular theme or plugin to work properly. Things have certainly changed under the hood, and quite a few addons need to be rewritten. Some of these rewrites are in the pipeline, so check out the WordPress codex for status.

Since I was fiddling with the site anyway, I decided to go for a new theme as well. It required some code changes to work properly, for example a simple thing as showing comments on pages was missing. Easily added. I also fiddled with the look&feel, so it’s not really a clean Prosumer theme anymore. Not enough changes to warrant a rebadge and release though. Not entirely happy about the colour scheme either, so here today gone tomorrow. Leave a comment if you can recommend a great theme that not too many others use.

Found some cool new plugins while updating. Like the Democracy Polls widget on the left, just below the ahem one click is enough Income widget.

Another thing I found out about WordPress in the upgrade process was that there are quite a number of hard coded references to your web site url in the database. Not just the single config entry you’d expect. So if you want to fire up a copy of the site under another name to see how 2.5 worked without destroying your primary site, you need to dump the database, do a search & replace on the dump and then restore to the new location.

The logo image is an umodified photo taken at low shutter speed in a tunnel, just cropped to show the interesting part.

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For some natty reason, my 64bit Ubuntu 8.04 server sometimes insists that a SCSI logging level of infinite detail is good for my health. Which means my messages, syslog and kern.log files get 50-100 lines like this per second:

Mar 18 23:52:25 home kernel: [ 8661.700076] scsi_add_timer: scmd: ffff81004da8a700, time: 7500, (ffffffff88123ed0)
Mar 18 23:52:25 home kernel: [ 8661.700117] scsi_delete_timer: scmd: ffff81004da8a000, rtn: 1

If you too are suffering from this then do the following:

1. First, stop it right now by starting a shell and typing:

sudo sysctl -w dev.scsi.logging_level=0

2. To make sure it doesn’t start up again after a reboot then edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf and add this line anywhere in the file:

dev.scsi.logging_level = 0

And you should be all set.

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Somewhere along the line, NVidia got a lot stricter in their monitor handling. If you used to be able to run X at high resolutions but all you can get after an upgrade is something like 1024×768 then it is likely that you have been caught by the clock check bug. You typically get lines like these in your Xorg log (/var/log/Xorg.0.log):

(WW) NVIDIA(0): No valid modes for "1920x1200"; removing.
(WW) NVIDIA(0): No valid modes for "1600x1200"; removing.

To get the X server to tell you exactly why it’s removing those two modes, try starting X with -logverbose 6 as arguments, and it will log something like this instead:

    (II) NVIDIA(0): Validating Mode "1600x1200":
    (II) NVIDIA(0): 1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
    (II) NVIDIA(0): For use as DFP backend.
    (II) NVIDIA(0): Mode Source: EDID
    (II) NVIDIA(0): Pixel Clock : 162.00 MHz
    (II) NVIDIA(0): HRes, HSyncStart : 1600, 1664
    (II) NVIDIA(0): HSyncEnd, HTotal : 1856, 2160
    (II) NVIDIA(0): VRes, VSyncStart : 1200, 1201
    (II) NVIDIA(0): VSyncEnd, VTotal : 1204, 1250
    (II) NVIDIA(0): H/V Polarity : +/+
    (WW) NVIDIA(0): Mode is rejected: PixelClock (162.0 MHz) too high for
    (WW) NVIDIA(0): Display Device (Max: 150.0 MHz).

If this used to work for you, and all you did was upgrade Ubuntu (or some other distro), then edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and add the line

Option         "ModeValidation" "NoMaxPClkCheck"

inside either the Screen or the Device group. Restart X and it should start up in a higher mode again. For more interesting options to set, try looking at the NVidia X driver documentation.

Leave a comment if you’re lost and I’ll try to guide you through the tricky parts.

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The old style Google AdSense for Content HTML code had a lot of information about the look and feel of an ad. Half a dozen colour values for background, foreground, links, text etc along with ad size, ad type and of course your ad code and perhaps channel code. Bit of a mess trying to keep track of everything, even with helpful addons like Adsense Manager (which sucks after v2.5). So Google has moved more of the fiddly bits into their AdSense administrative interface and the new thing is called an AdSense Unit. Old style HTML code:

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This week, two showstoppers appeared in the Ubuntu Hardy upgrade system. First one was a botched upgrade of a language package under OpenOffice and the other was a problem related to Python/APT/dpkg.

First one looked like this:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  language-support-writing-en: Depends: openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-us but it is not installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

The easy fix out of this one is to start up System->Administration->Synaptics Package Manager and uninstall “openoffice.org-hyphenation”. This will trigger a removal of about 85 packages including OpenOffice itself. When that is done, use the same Package Manager to install OpenOffice again and in goes the 85 packages again.

The second one looked like this:

Setting up python-apt (0.7.4ubuntu5) ...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 1593, in 
    main()
  File “/usr/bin/pycentral”, line 1587, in main
    rv = action.run(global_options)
  File “/usr/bin/pycentral”, line 982, in run
    self.pkg.byte_compile(bc_option, self.options.exclude)
  File “/usr/bin/pycentral”, line 624, in byte_compile
    rt.byte_compile(files, bc_option, exclude_regex)
AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘byte_compile’
dpkg: error processing python-apt (–configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

This has now been fixed, and a new python-central should be available at the repositories. I hacked my python-apt to bypass this before the official fix was out, but all you should have to do is update/upgrade as normal and everything will be fine.

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After upgrading to Dolphin 6.0004, Ray 3.1 and Orca there are multiple problems you can experience.

First one is that whenever you enter the forums, you get a popup box saying:

main div is not defined
please name main content container

This is due to bad caching in the application, and you have to remove a few cache files from the server to fix it. From your web server document root, these files are in orca/cachejs/ and groups/orca/cachejs/. Delete all the files that have a file name that looks like junk, i.e. something like e3d43deace3edbc…

Second problem is that they messed up the Ray part of the upgrade so that all widget licenses are invalidated and can’t be reinstated. To fix this you have to download and apply a hotfix. Download the hotfix here. You get a zip file, unzip in document root and it will overwrite a handful of files. After this you have to input all your Ray widget licenses again, but this time it should work.

There are undoubtedly more, but those were the ones I experienced. Note that this is not an endorsement of this product at all, rather the opposite. It’s a complete mess with a non-existing support organisation and a web presence that boggles the mind. It’s spread across half a dozen web sites and I can’t find a single thing there.

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