January 12th, 2010 Matt
I recently started a new blog for my photos, which I’m starting to advertise for sale through Etsy (links to follow once I have some more things in place
) and I added the WordPress Flickr Manager plugin so that I can easily pull in pictures from my Flickr account into the blog. However, it didn’t work with WordPress 2.9
So, I made a couple of changes to some files and it seems to be working now – so, if anyone is having the same problems, here’s a list of the files that I changed:
- wordpress-flickr-manager/js/wfm-lightbox.php
- wordpress-flickr-manager/js/media-panel.php
- wordpress-flickr-manager/js/wfm-hs.php
In each of those files, remove any ‘@’ characters that are in the files, for example:
this: wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
becomes: wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
Once you have made the changes, the plugin should work fine.
EDIT – March 15 2010 @1534
I’ve just had a look at the files that I changed to provide a fuller explanation of what I changed. I can’t see what I have changed in the media-panel.php file (just downloaded the plugin again and can’t find any ‘@’ signs in there now), but the changes I made to the other files are:
wfm-hs.php
Line 13 - wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
becomes - wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
Line 21 - wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
becomes- wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
wfm-lightbox.php
Line 58 - wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').click(function() {
becomes - wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').click(function() {
Line 91 - wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function(){
becomes - wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function(){
I’ve tested this with WP 2.9.2 this afternoon and it seems fine.
UPDATE – 11th July 2010
I’ve just been looking a bit more at this and have added a few replies to some comments. I have the plugin working on WP3.0 now – I made no changes to the version I had before though. The one thing that doesn’t work is trying to add photos from a set rather than just from the stream.
When you try to add a photo from a set, it only finds photos that are publicly available. If the photos are not public, then it doesn’t find them in the set. I don’t know whether this is a problem with the plugin, or a problem with the Flickr API though. I make most of my photos private, so if I want to add from a set then it’s a problem – that said, I have the same problem when adding from Flickr to my photo printing service, which makes me think that the problem lies with the Flickr API rather than the plugin.
Looks like a more in depth examination of the plugin is required – if I get chance to do it, I will, but I am quite busy with work that brings in money at the moment, rather than coding for fun and hobby.

Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle | 44 Comments »
December 4th, 2009 Matt
OK – so now I’ve got the VMWare default username for logging in.
It’s “root”. EEK!
Couple of minor things there – firstly, I’m not too keen on just running these things as the root user. Secondly, not everyone knows the root password. And thirdly, not everyone changes the root password from the default that is generated when you install Ubuntu.
Now, in Windows, any Windows user can log into the VMWare console. In order to get that to work under Ubuntu (and I guess every flavour of Linux), you need to edit the configuration file which can be found in /etc/vmware/hostd/authorization.xml.
So, modify the file and then restart VMWare using
sudo service vmware restart
and you should now be able to log in as your different user.

Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle | No Comments »
December 4th, 2009 Matt
Well, the installfest continues….
Today, I had problems getting the 64-bit version of VMWare server to install correctly. I uninstalled it, started again, hit errors (some of my own making, some not) and then found out that it was a bug.
Since it took me a while to find out how to fix it, I’ll just give you a link to where I got the info from – it’s here.
Thankyou AcmeLabs – now I just need to find out my username and password to get into it!!

Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle | No Comments »
December 3rd, 2009 Matt
As I said earlier today, the installfest to get rid of Windows and move to an operating system is under way.
I eventually got three monitors running at the same time after much playing with xorg.conf, but ended up with one screen doing it’s own thing, and a separate desktop spanning the other screens. Not quite what I wanted, since I want to be able to drag and drop between the screens.
In the end, I’ve given up on the idea of getting the three screens working together, and have gone for the following really basic xorg.conf file which gives me a desktop spanning two of the three screens – something I can live with!
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Configured Screen Device"
Device "Configured Video Device"
SubSection "Display"
Virtual 2560 1024
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection
I’m sure that there must be a way to get one big desktop across the three screens, but for now, I’ll settle for the two working properly!

Posted in General Computing | No Comments »
December 3rd, 2009 Matt
When Windows 7 was released, I gleefully decided that this was going to be my chance to get away from XP Professional 64-bit, since it crashed reasonably frequently (every day or so). Not too much of a problem, since it normally happened overnight, but when you are downloading the latest version of eBusiness Suite, then it can be annoying to say the least.
So, I stumped up my £150 for Ultimate edition, and a couple of days after the release date, it duly arrived. Nice clean install – two new 1.0TB hard drives, two new ATI graphics cards, all ready to go. No problems with the install (which was only to be expected, since the drives were completely new and hadn’t been used before), and then I started to actually use the system.
And it crashed.
And it crashed.
And it crashed again. At least once a day, and every night – the PC crashed. Annoying when you aren’t using it – VERY frustrating when you have just waited 20 minutes for a virtual machine to start and it blue screens. No help from Microsoft, no help on the net, nothing.
And so, this week, while I was at UK OUG, I decided to leave the machine running a live CD version of Ubuntu 9.10 to see how that went. Last night, when I got home, it was still running – 5 days of uptime.
So, today it’s goodbye to Windows 7, hello Ubuntu – and the installfest continues

Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle | No Comments »
October 14th, 2009 Matt
A while back, I wrote this post about the dreaded “existing state of the packages” error when recompiling code that is used in a Workflow process.
There is some degree of official guidance on what you need to do now, contained in Metalink note 754993.1 – “How can you Avoid Bouncing the Database after Changing a WF Package”. The advice is, to be honest, perhaps a little Draconian and unwieldy, but the guidance from Oracle is that all you need to do is:
- Shut down the concurrent managers
- Flush the shard pool
- Update the package
- Restart the concurrent managers
Now, that certainly will do it (so would bouncing the database, though!) – the likelihood of a developer shutting down the managers, then flushing the pool, and THEN compiling their code is probably quite low, though

Posted in Oracle, Technical | 1 Comment »
August 27th, 2009 Matt
Normally, I’m described as wither a “consultant” or a “contractor” depending on what the client is expecting me to do – I much prefer the more consultancy-oriented roles, where there is a genuine interest in your input to help devise the best solution for them, rather than the contractor-oriented roles which tend to be much more of the “here is what you need to do, here is how to do it, now go and do it and don’t ask any questions” variety.
Recently, I found an amusing definition of consultant, contractor and freelancer on The Daily WTF (Worse Than Failure!) blog:
Consultants fill the gap when an organization needs to leverage their collective synergy with a quality-driven approach that focuses on delivering key objectives. Contractors are great when the only remaining solution is throwing more bodies at the problem. And freelancers, they’re perfect for companies on a budget, hoping to build their technology infrastructure ten dollars at a time.

Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle | No Comments »