h4x3d.com » update

OS X Lion is now available for download

jz — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 12:57:40 +0000

Apple released the long-awaited update for Snow Leopard today.
It’s name, in line with the leo-animal branding is “Lion”.

If you don’t see it in the AppStore, the only place where it is available on the internet (legally) right now, don’t be upset and click this link (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-lion/id444303913?mt=12) which will take you to Apple’s official page. Then proceed from there – it will then, after a click on the 29,99 (or whatever it costs in your local currency), open in the AppStore, where you can continue with the buying process and then start downloading.

I am doing it right now – some 3 GB to go.

So what’s going on with the site and in general?

jz — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:19:47 +0000

As regular visitors may have noticed there were only few (or no) updates to the site in the past few weeks (or months).
This was primarily due to the fact that most of my time was soaked up with finishing my diploma thesis.
I have now successfully graduated from university and will be entering “business” in October this year.
In the meantime I plan to simplify this site and update most of the 700 posts.
My advertisement revenue is down from previous 900 $ USD to a laughable 11 $ USD a month, while the number of visitors has just slightly declined from 10,500 (daily) to 5,000 (okay that’s a 50% drop, but still). The drop in ad revenue is also explained with the new theme that I introduced in December 2009. It is, as I may have to admit, too confusing and too colourful/image heavy.
Many preferred the white theme before (2007 to 2009). In that sense I will try to do a good job in coming up with a real simple and user-friendly design. After all this site is not primarily for me, but for you. Also, I need to fix the download links and generally links that link-out. I will pay more attention to comments. For all the trouble and lack of updates I am sorry. Stay posted and keep the comments coming.

Cannot resolve downloads.wordpress.org or WordPress Dashboard empty?

jz — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:14:44 +0000

Cannot resolve downloads.wordpress.org ?
You are not alone!

I am running WordPress MU 2.8.4. and till today I have had no issues using the auto upgrade or auto update function of WordPress Plugins or WordPress MU Plugins until everything stopped working.

I pretty much googled for one hour and tried different solutions here and there, but nothing really worked, as the root/cause of the problem was literally at “root” level: I had to edit the /etc/hosts file on my server to reflect the correct IPs of wordpress.org

Open up the file /etc/hosts and add the following lines at the end:
You get to this file by ssh’ing into your server and typing “cd /etc/“.
On any unix server you can edit the hosts file by typing “vi hosts”
In vi, press i to insert and paste (usual command+v) the lines below.
Press ESC briefly to exit the insert-mode. Then type in the following: :wq.
The : tells vi to change into command mode, the w to write to file and the q to quit the file.
Make sure to restart the httpd service by typing service restart httpd.
Some steps may be different depending on your setup, but this should in general work!

Below the IPs and the hostnames:

72.233.56.139 wordpress.org 72.233.56.138 downloads.wordpress.org 72.233.56.139 planet.wordpress.org 74.125.47.147 blogsearch.google.com 72.233.56.139 api.wordpress.org 72.233.56.142 codex.wordpress.org

(C/P’ed from http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/14891)

Of course, if the IP addresses change in future, the ones entered before will have to be changed.
This can be done by simply pinging the domains from either command line (terminal on Mac OS X or cmd on Windows), using “ping”. On Mac OS X you will want to use “ping -c 5 wordpress.org” to limit the query to five pings. If you want to stop your pinging before, just break the operation by pressing Command + C.

If you cannot use any command line tool you may want to consider using Ping.eu the cute pingu that helped me out with several network related operations in the past.

I hope this article will spare you the useless hours of Googling :)

Searched for “cannot resolve downloads.wordpress.org”
Did help:
mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/14891

Searched for “RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: name lookup timed out”
Did not help:
WordPress › Support » Dashboard issues: RSS Error:… – wordpress.org
wordpress.org/support/topic/293871

Searched for “An Unexpected HTTP Error occurred during the API request. “
Did not help:
WordPress › Support » Plugin API HTTP Error – wordpress.org
wordpress.org/support/topic/227430
WordPress › Support » Plugin Installer Bugs – wordpress.org
wordpress.org/support/topic/215527

Searched for “An Error has occured: name lookup timed out”
Did not help:
Case Study: RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: name lookup timed out … – bestwpthemez.com
www.bestwpthemez.com/…/case-study-rss-error-wp-http-error-name-looku
How-to Fix WP HTTP Error: name lookup timed out « Roll Over – fatlabmusic.com
fatlabmusic.com/blog/…/how-to-fix-wp-http-error-name-lookup-timed-o…

Searched for “Download failed. name lookup timed out”
Did not help:
WordPress › Support » name lookup timed out – wordpress.org
wordpress.org/support/topic/225535
Quick ‘n Dirty solution for wordpress: Download failed.:… – minkfarmen.net
sirmc.minkfarmen.net/…/quick-n-dirty-solution-for-wordpress-download-…

http://www.hart-empire.com/2009/03/26/download-failed-name-lo…

Alexa rating system has changed

jez — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:50:07 +0000

Just today I saw that Alexa has changed their rating system – their official news announcement says that NOW more sources will be used to come to a rating, also they claim to be using NEW algorithms that will determine the rating even better. Also the traffic from different countries is now taken into account. Hooray – I moved up to Alexa 25,000 (before change: 38,000), which is quite nice for a private blog with some 10,000 visitors daily.

A quick comparison of the famous wpdesigner.com site and my h4x3d.com:

Edit: heavy fcking decline due to university inactivity, damn…

WordPress 2.5 and chibby 404

jez — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:20:57 +0000

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and run a plugin update check. Most of the plugins work, which is amazing! Some plugins (two out of 31) were outdated and the automatic update procedure (either through the plugin central “plugin” or built-in wordpress, I dont know) worked out of the box, too. I just had to input my ftp credentials. Upgrading wordpress to 2.5 went without any major troubles as I used subversion. Again I had to use the sw command instead of the up command.
(see when-svn-up-does-not-work-wordpress-subversion for more and replace 2.3.3 by 2.5, else you downgrade by chance). Weird. Akismet was kind of “crapped out”, so was was form-advanced.php. I deleted them through putty and run an svn update again which fixed it.

Also I did the monthly sql optimization and junked out 9mb of crap. phpMyAdmin’s “optimize” sql works a charm!

What I need to do-
- contact alinks author-
- http://www.alinks.org/ as it is broken in version 1.0rc1
- fix the ela archive: Could not open cache file ’2008-4.dat’
-restore my fancy 404 page which I seem to have lost. anyone got it?
404 chibby page where are you!
- fix search (looks crap)
- update some of my themes?

There are a bunch of new plugins I want to test, but that has to wait till I have my term paper done (sigh)

Technorati love (apparently)

Google Pagerank update march 2008

jez — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:28:13 +0000

It seems like Google has finally (once again) updated their Pagerank Index -
h4x3d.com (this site) has climbed up one rank to Pagerank 6 which is not bad, but still I am striving for Page Rank 7 for the end of 2008!

It is really funny to check-out what it takes to get to PR6, respectively PR7 -
I have some 35,000 incoming links on Technorati, some 50,000 ++ people using my themes and crap loads of incomings links from other sites. Quite a development if I go back 1-2 years where I was mainly blogging about ramblings and things that were important to me. Thanks everyone!

Install Coppermine SVN (or upgrade/update)

jez — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:30:53 +0000

Uploading and Installing Coppermine is really is a time-consuming task – not if you can use subversion from the box and simply type:

svn co https://coppermine.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/coppermine coppermine

but just to be better safe than sorry I’d go for

svn co https://coppermine.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/coppermine/trunk/cpg1.4.x/ coppermine

because this is the version that is currently being worked and developed on.
As by the day of writing this, the most recent security release (patch) is only 3 days old- so there is work in progress.

I was not able (yet) to find out the real difference between coppermine 1.4 and 1.5 (or coppermine 1.4.x and 1.5.x) – usually higher numbers are better- right?

somehow though, it seems like the coppermine 1.4.x version is the only actively maintained and supported one (generally speaking in terms of themes and plugins and other fancy gadgets such as bridges to WordPress etc).

If you know anything new, please leave a comment!

When svn up does not work (WordPress subversion)

jez — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:20:58 +0000

Today WordPress 2.3.3. was released as an urgent security update to the last version.
I wanted to update my install by making use of my subversion install:
so as usually I’d go on with opening PuTTy and logging into my server.
From sh I’d enter

svn up

This for some reason did not fetch all files and no real update was carried out. Any idea why? I have no guess.
So what I did was:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3/

More to type, but luckily this does update everything. Still an annoyance that svn up did not work.

Status update November 2007

jez — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:36:37 +0000

Dear readers,
sorry for the lack of updates, I have been rather busy with university. Hence I am the General Manager of a small student company selling cardboard chairs (Fold ‘n Joy S.C.) and we have had some selling events recently most of my “dedicated web time” was sucked away. Some weeks ago, I sorted out zone.net’s blog, if you care, check it out.

Also, in the meantime I am writing a fifteen pages coursework about Offshoring and how western companies can benefit from it.
Then, concurrently there is another paper of twenty pages to be written. It is about a frozen food and should empower students to apply theoretical knowledge about international market screening and portfolio models. Sigh.. itÂ´s really a lot of typing, thinking, deleting and re-doing things.

Once I am done, IÂ´ll have to finish that Paris Hilton header for Gareth, work on themes for a Brazilian telecommunications company, carry-out some internal theme changes (gosh, the menu here looks way screwed on my MacBook – now as I got one I can tell) and then -IF- there is some spare time, do another Mischland mix for Deviantradio.

There is also a jungle/oldschool collection getting dust on in the cellar, I really need to get hold of another mixer (I own a Pioneer DJM-500) that is more interactive. It is really understandable to me seeing the RSS-readers count go down (from 390 in June when I released all those themes, to 250 when I posted some link collections to now 94 from inactivity…) – but believe it or not, I already scheduled a come back for December (only minor though, will be doing theme work then for Brazilian company), and the bigger one in January, where I have four week of lecture free time. I hope the themeviewer will then (at LAST!!) be fixed.

Will I be rumbling about Macs now as I got one? Not sure, but I guess so- my transition from PCs to a Mac have been rather unspectacular. I already call my Macbook CRAPbook (I hate not having a ‘right-click’ button but pressing “apple-key” – click)… well guys, see you around and thanks for sticking by.

I have some Harvey Birdman Attorny at Law (all episodes) piled up, just waiting for a free moment to release the links (I found).

WordPress 2.3.1

jez — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 10:13:01 +0000

WordPress 2.3.1 is out (just 13 hours ago) – updating using subversion took 10 seconds: Windows Key + E -> go to putty folder -> open putty -> h4x3d.com -> login: user / password: password -> cd httpdocs -> svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.1/ -> close putty, open firefox go to h4x3d.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php , press update -> voila all done :)