Anyway. In a couple of months I’m off on vacation to Australia for five weeks, and would really like to bring a laptop to be able to check the weather for the next few days, book interesting excursions a few days in advance, check email, upload travel photos to home server etc. My trusty old ThinkPad T41p (best laptop ever) has performed that job for several years, but its days as a holiday computer are numbered. I need a sub-notebook. Any will do, as long as it’s cheap, small, lightweight and has a battery capacity of 4-5 hours at least. Screen, keyboard and looks are secondary objectives.

The new Asus Eee PC 901 seems to fit the bill. $600, size around a couple of DVD cases, 1.1kg and the battery claims to manage 4-8 hours. The screen should have been 1280 wide for todays web pages, but at 1024 it’s not that bad. I can deal with a certain amount of sideways scrolling to read my local newspaper on a beach in OZ.

There are quite a few contenders at this point of course. The MSI Wind (also sold under the Microtel Wind name) had a small 3-cell battery (aka useless) in the first batch, with the 6-cell battery slated for september. Now it appears that the battery shortage never materialized and that MSI is getting the 6-cell to the people a little early. 10 inch screen, spinning hard drive, Eee resolution, 1.3kg with the 6-cell battery and notably bigger though… We’re aaaalmost entering small notebook territory again. Note the Amazon-links are all for the 6-cell versions running XP. Don’t get the 3-cells.

The Acer Aspire One, somewhere between the 901 and the Wind. The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC has the resolution advantage, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use those vertical mouse buttons. About the size of the 901 and lots of optional features available for a price.

The big boys are also loading their guns. The Dell 910 (wonder how they came up with that imaginative numbering scheme) looks promising, but the main thing there will be the price point. The Dell volume could take the entry in under $299. We should hopefully see in a couple of days. And Lenovo just rolled out the Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10, another $399 machine with comparable specs. Available in 2-3 weeks according to the Lenovo web site right now, several months earlier than previously thought. With the excellent Lenovo build quality and support, they may have a winner as well.

So, for the ones actually available for purchase right now it’s still the ASUS Eee PC 901 at the moment, but it’s still two months until I really need it so anything can happen.

Note all links are to the Windows versions of the various laptops. I will be getting the Linux version myself, but I expect most of you will opt for the Windows-version. If only to have a valid license to fall back on should you wish to reinstall Windows after having tried a Linux-distro. If you’re serious about getting one of the laptops mentioned by all means use the Amazon-links provided. Would keep me in coffee for a week or two!

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Asus Eee PC 901

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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

If you have a question or other comment, use the form below. Thank you!

Known bugs:

• There is a bug in the WordPress RSS engine, that sometimes show up when people use this widget. If you get something resembling “unknown function debug() in line 504 of wp-includes/rss.php” then that’s one of them. WP is aware of the problem, and apparently a fixed rss.php might be showing up in the next release. As a quick-fix edit wp-includes/rss.php and change line 503 from if ( MAGPIE_DEBUG ) { to if ( MAGPIE_DEBUG > 1 ) {
• When the widget fails with a php error like the one above, the template goes out of whack. I’ve made sure none of those are my fault in the next minor upgrade due out soon. I’m looking at better workarounds for the bug above first, so release might be a short while yet. Don’t want to spam you all with multiple releases like some widget writers…

Example of inline content replacement.

Default feed <–google-news–>, alternating randomly between two feeds:

A different feed <–google-news#non-default–>:

Shortcode test non-default [ google-news name="non-default" ]:

Shortcode test default [ google-news ]:

Shortcodes are only available in WordPress 2.5 and up.

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Google News plugin

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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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Logitech Duet, a problem solved

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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

Known bugs: See the Google News plugin post. These two widgets are virtually identical, so bugs also tend to be the same in both.

Let me know if you find bugs, or if you want additional features or changes. Admin-selectable news item look, extra class/id for CSS etc.

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CNN News plugin

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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

If you have a question or other comment, use the form below. Thank you!

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NASA Image Of The Day plugin

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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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Upgrading to WordPress 2.5

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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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Excessive SCSI logging under Ubuntu

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(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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Legacy NVidia Ubuntu woes

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google_ad_client = "pub-55555555555555555";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
google_ad_format = "728×90_as";
google_ad_type = "image";
google_ad_channel = "555555555555";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "7CC135";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "";

compared to the new:

google_ad_client = "pub-5555555555555555";
google_ad_slot = "55555555555";
google_ad_width = 160;
google_ad_height = 600;

The other parts of the puzzle, including the Google javascript call, remain the same. As you can see, bare bones is your ad code, a new thing called an ad slot and a width and height. The latter two to speed up page rendering, as the javascript code can tell the browser how much space it will consume before loading the actual ad.

Now, if you have a lot of these old style ads that you would like to convert then Google provides a conversion tool. And you want to convert, as the Google interface for keeping track of ad types and their look and feel is a step up from doing it by hand or by third party tool. and it only takes a minute per ad to convert, ish.

To convert, go to your AdSense page and select AdSense Setup followed by Manage Ads. Around the top you will see a link intuitively called import your old AdSense code. Hit that, and you will be greeted with a page containing a big text area and a small one. Now copy the HTML code (well, javascript-code) from an old ad into the big area and write a useful name for that ad into the small area and hit the button. You do not need to copy anything other than the javascript variables, they are what differentiates one ad from another.

Note that if the copy HTML code part above was greek to you then run through Google’s explanation before you continue.

Now for the stupid part which Google really should fix. If there is an error in the HMTL you paste in you will get the very unfriendly error The snippet is invalid. With absolutely no explanation on what is wrong. And the useless part is that this syntax checker is actually more strict than the one Google uses in real life so the code in question may show a completely valid advert on your web page but still be rejected by this tool. Now, the most common problem here is that quite a few tools that autogenerate AdSense ads, including Adsense Manager for WordPress, will forget to print some of the values. See the example above, where the last variable google_color_url has an empty string as value? This works fine in real life, especially since it’s an image only ad in the first place. But the converter will see this as a problem and give you the error mentioned above. So if you are absolutely sure you have pasted in the correct code and still get an error then make sure all the variables actually have proper values. Changing "" to "000000"
in this case and the code passes the test and you have a new unit. 

Now you can just use the new and improved style on your web pages, and if you want to change the look and feel of an ad then you can do so through the Google AdSense interface.

 Is it worth it? Not really just for the current functionality, but you never know when the old style stops being supported or when only new style ads get a new and flashy feature that mesmerizes the ad clicking crowd. So get on the band wagon now, it’s not difficult.

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Converting from Google AdSense for Content to the new AdSense Units

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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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Ubuntu Hardy upgrade woes

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