Just a quick post on the different ways that I’ve seen software companies delivering their software to the client.
In an ideal world, there are two main ways to do this. Quite often, a company might choose to sell the software that they produce for a client, delivering a (hopefully!) working application and the source code. Typically in this scenario, there is no major reason for the company to retain any rights to the code they wrote for the client, because the software has been customised to such an extent that it is only useful for one client.
In some other situations, though, companies might choose to license the software to the client. The company retains all ownership of the software, and they might provide regular bug updates and patches in exchange for a licence fee.
The third example, which I have unfortunately seen in a number of places over the years, sort of merges these two models together. The client pays for the source code, receives a “working” application and the code, but it is written in such a poor manner that if anyone other than the original developer worked on it, they would rapidly go insane!
Sadly, I’ve seen that third model occur more often than I would like to!
As part of my recent search through my SQL archive in my last two posts, I wanted to add the actual SQL files to the post, but WordPress didn’t recognize the file format so it wouldn’t accept it – I kept hitting the error “File Type does not meet security guidelines”
I’ve since made some changes to the WordPress code which should allow me to attach the files, but have struggled to make it so that my changes won’t get wiped out when I upgrade the blog next time.
The way that I’ve got round this is to make a quick change to the file functions.php within the theme that I’m using. By adding the code below to the existing PHP that was already in the functions.php file, my blog now allows me to upload text files with different extensions. This can be extended further (if I need / want to) by adding different extensions and different MIME types to the code:
The hard drive crashed last week and had to be binned, so I replaced it with an old one I had kicking about (which may not last too long, either!). I downloaded Linux Mint 9 from the official site and installed it from the DVD.
And the sound worked fine with no need to do anything else!
Top work from the Mint guys – saved me from hacking about again to get sound working
Since the Foehn & Hirsch laptop was a bit of a fiasco, I decided to re-use an old laptop of mine that I’ve had kicking around for a while. I bought an Acer TravelMate 3000 about four years ago now, because it was the best spec that I could find. I can’t remember the spec off the top of my head, but I remember the hard drive being over 100GB (huge in those days) and I’ve since doubled the memory to 2GB to make it last a bit longer. It’s been running Windows XP Professional since I got it, and that’s been fine, but as I said in the original post about the F&H laptop, my wife was so taken with my Linux Mint laptop, so I decided to rebuild it from scratch.
Firstly, I downloaded the 32-bit version of Linux Mint 8 from their website, as the version I used to build this laptop was the 64-bit and the old laptop doesn’t support 64-bit architecture. I burned the image to disc using Brasero, stuck it in the external DVD drive that came with the laptop, and booted it up.
As I’ve found on every system that I’ve built with Linux (Mint or Ubuntu) apart from the Foehn & Hirsch one, there were no problems – or certainly no obvious ones. The screen resolution was fine, the wireless network connected immediately (including the light on the front of the laptop working correctly), everything I checked was fine – so I reformatted the hard drive and replaced XP with Mint.
I then went off to work (I was away for a couple of days), and the girls told me that there was no sound working – the children want to watch childrens programs on iPlayer, play on CBeebies and watch YouTube and the like. I thought that it would be something really obvious like the speaker just being muted, but there was just nothing working. So, when I got home, I thought “this will be straight forward and take a couple of seconds…”
After about half an hour, I managed to track down the problem – the modem seemed to be conflicting with the soundcard (I think). Here’s how I found the source of the problem and resolved it.
Quick update – they found that the laptop was faulty when it arrived back and have refunded the cost of the laptop. I have raised a new customer support note because eBuyer have kept hold of the £9.99 shipping costs for sending the faulty unit out to me, which I don’t believe they should have done.
So far, it has cost £9.99 not to get a working laptop from eBuyer, so the complaint goes on.
Last week, my house was broken into and one of our laptops was stolen. Not too much of a big deal, since there wasn’t much data on there (thank goodness for Cloud computing!), and once the insurance assessor visited, I went out and bought a new machine. Since this was for my wife, I left her using my Toshiba Portege M800 which runs Linux Mint 8 x64, just to see what she thought of it and whether she could move from Vista to Linux.
After a few days of it, she was mightily impressed – there are some nice features of Mint that she liked over Vista, so asked if the replacement could be one that ran Linux. No problems – might be a bit cheaper, after all! – so I hunted down a Foehn & Hirsch laptop on eBuyer.com which was cheap, and came with no OS. Here’s the detailed spec:
Processor
Intel T3000 Celeron Dual Core Processor 1.8Ghz,
1MB Cache
SIS M672 + 968 Graphics Chipset
Memory
4GB DDR2 667MHz
2 x SO DIMM
Expandable to 4GB
Hard Drive
320GB SATA 2.5″
Optical Drive
DVD+/-RW Supermulti
Software
Operating System: No Operating System
Display
15.6” HD TFT
Resolution: 1366 x 768
Graphics
SiS M672 Integrated
Shared Memory Architecture 256MB
High Preference 3D/2D graphic Accelerator
Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Compatible
Super Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0
Audio
High Definition Audio
Compliant With Microsoft UAA
Direct Sound 3D
2 x Built in Speaker
Built in Mic
Input Devices
Multi Language Keyboard
Touchpad with Scroll zone
Networking
56K Fax Modem
Built in 10/100MB Base-TX Ethernet LAN
WLAN: 802.11 b/g
Power Supply
Full Range AC Adapter 65W
AC in 100~240V, 50~60Hz
DC Out 19V, 3.42A / 18.5V, 3.5A
6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
up to 2.5 hour battery life
Dimensions
Width 374mm
Depth 256mm
Height 25~37mm
Weight 2.7kg
Interfaces
3 x USB 2.0 ports
1 x VGA port
1 x Headphone port
1 x Microphone port
1 x S/PDIF output port
1 x RJ-11 port
1 x RJ45 LAN port
1 x DC-in jack
Expansion
7 in 1 Card Reader (MMC / RSMMC / SD / Mini SD / MS / MS Pro / MS Duo)
1 x Express Card Slot
Warranty / Miscellaneous
1 Year Manufacturer Warranty
1.3mp Webcam
That should be fine, I thought – keep her in laptops for a while, good spec and should be fine for Linux. There was nothing anywhere that I could find that said otherwise, apart from a line that said “Please note that this Laptops does not have an Operating System installed, Ebuyer recommends Genuine Microsoft Software”
I’ve just been asked a question which seems to fit the classic Tom Kyte “my car won’t start” scenario – a few pieces of information (which are of relevance to the asker, who has been looking at it for a while) but there is nothing there that provides any information about what the problem actually is.
Here’s a video from ZD Net Australia – it’s an interview with Tom about how developers should ask for help:
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:
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.
There’s a line from C3-PO in Attack of the Clones where he sees robots making battle droids, and he says something like “machines making machines! Huh! How perverse”.
So now that I have VMWare running, here’s my version – Linux running Linux
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.
