The suggested workaround to disable this revision function is to enter a variable in your wp_config.php file. But this takes away the functionality from the entire blog.

I discovered a superb plugin today that makes this process very simple. It allows you to define the setting from the WordPress aministration interface on a Global basis. That is, to

• Disable All revisions for all posts/pages
• And override on a per-page/post basis.

For example, I can set Revisions to Disabled globally, and then enable it to store say 5 revisions for a Specific page(Without affecting any other pages).

You’ll find some Info ( & Download link) on it here:
 http://dd32.id.au/wordpress-plugins/revision-control/

This is not MU compatible yet (untested).

The best part is the live collaboration that Google or the likes of Zoho have made possible. Online collaboration among team members was something in which Microsoft has also dabbled, but in its typical manner of releasing “Enterprise” features. No surprise that that has never really become the norm outside some corporate microcosms.

Today, Google has upped the ante in the war for online document editing by launching the templates. Simple addition to their rapidly growing arsenal, but a shape of things to come. From wedding invites to business letters, it’s an easily expandable service. The API and “open source” extensibility thinking of Google will make sure that you or I can contribute our own templates to the gallery. Nifty.

1. MainMenu. Free. Superlative. Creates a neat little menu item on the top bar. Better than most other tools I have tried for this purpose, especially in its clean interface. Sometimes, if you have the pleasure of experiencing a situation when the Trash won’t clean because OSX says that the “Application is still in use” but you’re sure you quit it and it’s not live anyway, MainMenu’s “Force Empty Trash” is a fabulous tool to have at your fingertips.
   
2. Little Snitch: Tells you everytime some program on your machine wants to “call home” and connect to some server. Great flexibility in allowing the program to connect to a server, a port, or in general. Allow (or Deny) it to connect only once, or until the application quits, or Forever.
   
3. RCDefaultApp: Just as it is on any OS from Windows to Ubuntu, it often happens that you would like to associate certain file types with certain applications. On Mac OSX, we do have the same right-click contextual menu as Windows that allows “Open with [Application]” and “Make this the default application”, but for some reason this doesn’t always work, and occasionally doesn’t even show up as an option. No matter. RCDefaultApp is the application that allows you to do that superbly, and then some.
   
4. Butler: Another small utility with a negligible footprint that allows for some nifty shortcuts to stuff already on your machine.
   
5. Perian: No Mac should be without this. This pretty much explains itself. There’s a nice video tutorial here that shows how easy it is to install and then forget it. Suddenly your Quicktime (and iTunes) will be able to play a whole raft of video formats. If you want to be really equipped, get the Divx codec, the 3ivx, and Flip4Mac which plays wmv (Windows Media Player) files on your Mac. Of course if you get really frustrated there’s always the tried and tested VLC Player.
6. CleanApp: The best application uninstaller out there, hands down. Don’t believe for a minute when the OSX manuals tell you that on a Mac all you need to do is drag the application into the Trash and you’re done. BS. Many applications (think Adobe) install several things in several locations. CleanApp 3 tells you all the associated trappings of these applications and allows you to uninstall them all together.CleanApp is not free, alas (there is always a poor man’s AppCleaner, which does some basic stuff) but it allows for much more granular control. The best part: CleanApp has a “Logging” service that keeps track of whatever you install, and then knows in granular detail everything that you need to uninstall later; you can enable and disable this logging service at will, so it is useful to keep it generally off and only switch it on before you are undertaking a serious install of software, such as Final Cut Pro from Apple for example.
7. TinkerTools: To modify the many system preferences in your OSX that should have been made tinker-able but are not. Us Windows switchers are used to modding everything, so this is a fabulous tool.
8. Transmission: The best torrent client for OSX. Very simple, no-nonsense, and yet pretty interface. BitRocket is all google-juiced as it has been around longer, but it went down more often than Paris Hilton’s pants.  Limewire now has an OSX version too, but I am done with crashing and slow download speeds unless you cough up a few dollars.
   
9. Candy Bar: If you really, really want to modify your icons. Panic is one of the better software developers for the OSX platform. Their Unison tool, a native OSX Usenet client is pure code poetry. There’s a lot of iconography available at their partner website IconFactory. CandyBar is not free though. If you are short on cash, you can always try the somewhat barebones LiteIcon.

   

10. Vienna: The best and most elegant RSS reader client for OSX at the moment. Now if only they could sync it with Google Reader, Bob might be my uncle. How long has the Google API been out now!?
11. Chicken of the VNC: The best VNC client out there, connects without problems to Windows VNC servers too.
    

    

12. OmniDiskSweeper: As you start using your OSX, and installing applications and such, your hard disk usage keeps mounting (no pun intended). The fast, small footprint OmniDiskSweeper does this job faster than anything else on the market, including the somewhat visually prettier WhatSize.

On Windows, there is the fantastic SSH2 tool SecureCRT. Or if you’re cash crunched, a combination of Putty and Putty Connection Manager works for many.

On Mac OSX and Unix/Linux systems, one doesn’t truly need an SSH client at all, because the “Terminal” application is inbuilt. People talk of iTerm and such, but I have still to see a value add for such tools.

But one does miss the convenience of SecureCRT on OSX, because I have still to find a true SecureCRT alternative for the Mac platform. Something that allows me to make pre-determined connections so I can just click on them to connect (which tools like JellyfiSSH do) and then logs me in directly without prompting for a password (which JellyfiSHH does not do).

So I have simply made aliases in my [code].profile[/code] file, which gets executed everytime you start your Terminal window (so it’s a good place to put your shortcuts and any code you wish to execute when the terminal starts, such as paths).

1. Start the Terminal.
2. Open the profile file for the current user (you).

pico .profile

3. Enter a new line for our shortcut.

alias s='ssh -2 -p 22 user@host.com'

Quick explanation for that command in step 3. The letter “s” is the shortcut I make for connecting to the sniptools.com server. Change it to what you wish. This will mean that when I start Terminal, all I need to do is type “s” and it connects me via SSH to the sniptools.com server. The “-p” switch is an important one because some of us with paranoid security settings might have a different port number than the default port 22 for secure SSH. The rest user/host stuff is self-explanatory. The “-2” is to force SSH2 connections instead of older vanilla SSH.

Now. Save the profile file and source it to try it out:

source .profile

Sourcing is only for this one time, for your current Terminal window, which had already executed the profile file *before* we added this alias. When you start a new Terminal session, these aliases et al will be automatically set for you.

Done. Now your profile has the alias for “s”. From now when you type “s” in your Terminal, it will connect, but it will ask you for a password.

To get rid of the nagging password, we need to create public authentication key for the domain. This, in fact is what SecureCRT does behind the scenes on Windows too.

Here are the steps to accomplish this. Run these one-time commands in order from the Terminal window, $ is the command prompt. Leave the green stuff in the instructions below, those are just my comments to explain what each command does.

#generate pub and priv keys, leave the passphrase empty (simply press ENTER when asked for it)
$ ssh-keygen

#copy the pub key to the remote computer
$ scp ~/.ssh/is_rsa.pub user@host:~/

#log on to the remote computer
$ ssh user@host

#create the .ssh directory in the root login directory, if it doesn’t already exist
$ mkdir .ssh

#append key to file
$ cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

#delete the public key file, no longer needed
$ rm id_rsa.pub

#log off the remote server
$ exit

#logon to the remote server, without password prompt
$ ssh -2 -p 22 user@host

That’s it. This is a huge timesaver. Now all I need to do to login to the sniptools.com server is type one letter, “s” in the Terminal, and I’m on! Follow these instructions for each host you connect to on a regular basis and you’ll love the convenience henceforth.

Now I don’t know about you, but to me this bloo-ey look is hideous.I am not on Vista yet, by choice, so that sky blue gradation thing going on the top was not my cuppa. Why software designed for a certain platform cannot honor a user’s general system UI preferences is beyond me, but Office 2007 does insist on having it’s own look and feel. As though the new ribbon clutter was not enough.

I wanted to get rid of those ribbons to begin with. So I downloaded the the free version of Ribbon Customizer. They offer some Pro version but it does things I don’t particularly care about. Alternatively, there is ToolbarToggle, but on their site I did not seem to catch a free version, and I was unwilling to pay for this stuff.

The RibbonCustomizer install is pretty straightforward and when you start Word 2007 after its installation, here is how Word looks. There is an additional item in the View menu at the end:

I clicked on the obvious menu option to make ClassicUI my first menu tab. This is what this does:

That’s a good start, but I now wanted to clean up some other stuff. Fortunately, Microsoft chose to include the additional “Minimize Ribbon” feature, which contextually hides the ribbon when your focus is on writing inside the document. So let’s do that:

Now to get rid of the forced Blue. Click on the “More Commands” option in the menu shown in the screenshot above. Choose Silver and make other adjustments to your taste:

Now this is what Word 2007 looks like, with minimized ribbon, classic 2003 UI, and a somewhat less intrusive silver gradient:

Phew. I also recommend setting the default “Save” options as your regular Word “.doc” instead of the new “.docx” (or other .xlsx and .pptx equivalents) as that is a bit more standard even today in 2008.

It’s called Audion: get it here.

It’s now a FREE software. Just use the free serial provided:

RNL07P0-030HWMV-4MAGDS3-4U17REX

Works perfectly.

While searching for a converter between the captioned formats, Google did not turn up too much. After some searching I found a nifty little utility that allows you to convert between many formats of subtitles. It’s Windows only, so if you are not on Windows you may have to use this within a virtual machine:

Download Subtitle Workshop

Usage is as simple as loading a subtitle file from the File menu, and then Save As and Bob’s your uncle.

Apple is on to some exciting things. After the iPhone and the new eagerly awaited of the Max OSX, it even announced Safari 3 Beta for Windows!

The install was painless. Especially if you choose the no-Quicktime option (which Apple has no qualms about plugging shamelessly with almost every download it offers). I was also asked during the installation for ‘Bonjour’ — a tool that supposedly allows better sharing of things such as printers.

The immediate uninstall

When I started the browser, it came up in some weird language. Greek, or Russian, or a specific kind of Celt. Who knows. I tried to reinstall, and it insisted on removing Safari first, which is ok, but it also required me to close Firefox, SecureCRT (for SSH) and WinSCP (for SFTP). I like my browsers to be independent of each other thank you. Opera never bothers with what else I am using.

The second and final uninstall

After the re-install, it showed up yet again in the strange language. Nowhere on my system is this language set up. All my browsers are set up to show only English, but support Japanese and Chinese. I guess it’s “beta” for a reason. It surely has a long way to go if it wants to be anywhere near decent contention to FF and Opera. Below’s a snapshot of what this gunk looks like on my machine:

Turns out these junk characters are not really a language at all. When I try to type something in the location bar, it comes up in this junk lingo. I try and rummage through these nonsensical options to see if one of the menus or submenus may have “English” as an option, but no luck.

Conclusion

This mutt is off my PC before it could even bark. So long, Safari, and thanks for all the fish.

Most Cpanel/WHM servers come with PHP and Zend installed. With the recent (and important) update of PHP 5.2.1, the Zend Optimizer that is installed by default (version 3.0.1 as of this writing) breaks.

You might begin to see a message like this:

To fix this, simply login to your SSH as root and execute the following command to upgrade Zend Optimiser:

/scripts/installzendopt 3.2.8

Note that if you skip the version number, Zend Optimizer 3.0.1 will be installed by default. The trick is to specify the version as above. This will also work in the future, so as long as you know the latest released version of Zend Optimizer, just replace the red text above with that number.

Novell’s openSUSE has been getting some press lately. To move along their gamble for enterprise Linux, they conducted a massive survey (of sorts) in which they have compiled the ratings of some 27,000 + users and have come up with a profile of the folks who use Linux.

No, wait. That’s not truly *all* Linux users. It’s only openSUSE users. Sample bias and all that. To quote the questionnaire:

And then, there’s the fun in noting the “Document Properties” of this PDF file:

Is it just me or is there some delicious irony in that?

Anyway, so, basically, this Apple Macintosh created pdf file is a *general survey* of opinions and usage experiences of openSUSE for the developers and those working in and around openSUSE. Nothing more, nothing less. It shows that the majority of users are males in their 20’s who consider themselves computer savvy (quick, act surprised). However most are not IT types the survey concludes. But some of the interesting facts the survey came up with were:

• Some 70% of users Dual boot both Windows and openSUSE Linux. (This means not even the people who have jumped on the Linux bandwagon have altogether abandoned Windows).
• Almost 90% have a DSL/Broadband internet connection. (Which is useful as most Linux distro’s need updating right after installation — how’s that for an end-user OS?)
• Over 70% chose the KDE interface instead of Gnome when using OpenSuse Linux. (Good to know. Haven’t we had it with Gnome lovers — guys, Gnome just looks butt-ugly.)
• Over 85% indicated that they have no involvement with openSUSE and don’t even file bug reports. (Ha!)
• Over 60% use OpenSuse Linux was private use. (Not surprising, because openSUSE is the non-enterprise version. Who conducted this survey?)

A quick glance at the grand survey will reveal several oddities. For instance, “Question 4. What’s your profession” ? Now just about anyone who can spell Linux knows the number one profession among Linux users…um, and it’s the one profession that can legally get away with being 98% male (a good friend of mine is 98% male), with an age of around 25-30. Duh? Some of the final questions in the survey were interesting — about various aspects of the OS, such as hardware support, stability, security, software and so forth. On a scale of 1 to 5 most scored the OS in the 3 to 4 range. The highest rating 4.56 was for price. Is that indicative? Hmm. For a free OS..

This is a classic (and moronic) PR damage control after the flak that Novell picked up by getting in bed with Microsoft. A survey clearly written for corporate clients, reapplied and repackaged for openSUSE users as a ruse to appear committed to open-source and Linux.