Beta 7 update was the big bummer for me. The Status Bar has disappeared from the it usually location (bottom of the window), where major browsers have it, and moved to elbow the address bar, here.

There are a few problems with this approach:

- Security. There are more bobby trapped websites with malicious content or copycat of genuine website that will easily benefit from the user not knowing what links are clicking on.
- Average user will not notice the change and some of them will end up living “without” status bar, reducing the effort of security awareness many are trying to convey.
- For those who have noticed the change: on long URLs, you either don’t see the full site address where you are going, or you loose track of what page/URL you are in before moving.

There are already scores of complains regarding this specific change on Firefox feedback page.

For now, there are a few add-ons that will plug this critical visibility feature, although I try to avoid as many as possible.

Fingers crossed for Beta 8. For now, I’m going back to Firefox 3.6 – the latest stable version.

Click to enlarge

Based on Google Maps, it takes 50mins to get from a street to Folkestone to Eurotunnel based on the same city. First, you will need to drive to Dover (to get Eurotunnel in Folkestone?!!), then get the ferry from Eastern Docks. Once halfway through the tunnel, get off at a place called “Boulougne-sur-Mer” which means Boulougne on sea, which is not on the sea, but around 22miles south from Calais.

If one survives the strip, I reckon it will take all day to do it!

The moral of this story is; don’t always trust Google Maps or your GPS navigation device, no matter how good manufactures claims they are. Go back to good old maps from time to time.

How to Reproduce:

Go to google maps and type:
Source: St. Michaels Street, Folkestone, Kent CT20, UK
Destination: Eurotunnel, Folkestone, UK

]]> http://www.redouane.co.uk/the-most-stupid-way-to-cross-the-english-channel-or-la-manche.html/feed 0 http://www.redouane.co.uk/the-nosier-your-environment-the-less-tastier-your-food-will-be.html http://www.redouane.co.uk/the-nosier-your-environment-the-less-tastier-your-food-will-be.html#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:53:53 +0000 Redouane http://www.redouane.co.uk/?p=81 A recent article published on BBC website reveals that researchers have discovered why the same food will probably taste differently depending on the background noise level. It does shed some light on why most people complain about the blandness of airline food.

I personally agree with the findings based on experience. Background noise such as loud music, busy street or chatty people during the meal has always influenced my ratings on how tasty my meal was.

The noise level is likely a destruction to the brain and the taste to prevent it from indulging the full extent of the various components and ingredients that the dish may hold.

The fact remains that the food itself has to be tasty to be enjoyed in quieter environment, but doesn’t explain why a increasing number people, mostly the young generation, enjoys fast food in busy and noisy streets. Maybe the hunger level plays another factor.

This is a just a note to self so I can remind myself not to dose off again…

I think it was Saturday when I was able to view my blog, but every time I click on any WordPress post on this blog, I got a 404 error – page can not be displayed. I was puzzled and didn’t know what would cause this. I certainly didn’t make any changes on WordPress settings and I don’t have at time of writing any non-default plugin. The only change I remember making was on Hotlink settings on cPanel to test stopping other sites using images from one of my sites. Anyway, I’ve disabled the settings as I was just experimenting with the option.

As you might expect, I Googled for “404 on page and post wordpress” and found the following report.

The reporter, Randa, apparently tried to delete the “uncategorized” category, but that wasn’t my case and didn’t answer why every post link I click on the front page is throwing a 404 error. After some digging, I found the solution by using the following easy steps:

- Login to WordPress Admin Panel
- Click on Settings
- Click on Permanlinks
- Hit Save Changes

As you can see, the solution is very easy and could perceive as silly, but it did work for me and that’s what matters. I discovered the above steps when I changed the Permanlinks back to Default, which resolved the issue. When I changed it back to Custom Structure, access to posts and pages still works.

Hopefully, the above will help resolve the same issue someone else is seeing without going through any radical solutions such as reinstalling WordPress.

Now, deleting previous post revisions can be done easily from phpMyAdmin which is available with most web hosting providers from cPanel or other hosting control panel. Once you are on phpMyAdmin, select the database of your WordPress blog, if you have more than one, and run the following SQL statement:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;

The only draw back of removing previous revisions is that you won’t to go back to earlier version of posts. On the plus side, it will help reduce the size of WordPress database and process queries much faster (when blog pages are served to users).

Looking at the first print screen you will see the latest headlines stating: “The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has died in hospital in Oxford, aged 81”

Clicking the link will take you to “Obama warns against health delay”

Oh well, it’s Friday…

This announcement appears to come as tactical response to Google new Chrome OS, which is still in works. Microsoft flag ship product will compete against Google web apps which has been made available 3 years ago. Microsoft’s group product manager for Office told the BBC:

“…and what they tell us today is that going to the web often means they sacrifice fidelity, functionality and the quality of the content they care about. We knew that if and when we were ever going to bring applications into a web environment, we needed to do the hard work first because we hold such a high bar,”

Although the news was welcome by many who would like the power of working with Microsoft Office online, this didn’t go down well with Microssft partners. There was a lot of moan and questions on what Microsoft was trying to achieve, but Steve Ballmer hit back saying:

“If you wanted things that never change you probably shouldn’t be in the IT business. The one thing you can count on in our industry is that things change. And yet for every opportunity that looks like it gets smaller there’s at least three or four opportunities that look like they get bigger.”

“You [partners] have to sit here and say: ‘On anything where they are doing well, will they keep it up? On anything where they are not doing well, will they keep at it until they get it right or are they doing to go home?’ We don’t go home,” Ballmer shouted.

I think the Google attempt to gain personal PC (at least) started with the release of Google Chrome browser. Google was testing the waters and getting data combined from different sources including it search engine. There are also clear needs in the market for an Operating System that is:

- Secure: the number of virus, exploits and other malicious content is not slowing down and users are having a hard time keeping up with threats. An OS designed with security in mind is very much needed.

- Fast: Speed is number 1 priority to many users out there. Nobody likes to wait 10min or more for their systems to start up and then another 15min to deal with various pop-ups and messages that can be from Windows or other 3rd party products. Getting things done fast sounds ideal, but still not achievable by many.

- Simple: Nice and shiny desktop is great, but if gets too complicated the user interest is lost and productivity is affected.

Blog post by Sundar Pichai , Google VP Product Management, suggests that all the above will be available:

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

How is this accomplished you may wonder? The answer is in the base OS:

“The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.” Does this mean another Mac-like OS?

It’s important to note that Google Chrome OS will be shipped in Notebooks first and it’s an OS for the web, meaning that’s designed to use web apps online rather than have traditional software installed.

In summary, there are a lot of goodies promised in the new Chrome OS. Not a lot of details yet or ETA when it’s going to be available. I guess we just have to wait and see.

There is also the AutoSave option which automatically save the content of the post at an interval, just in case the WordPress admin page is closed accidentally or Internet connection is lost before you had a chance to save your work.

There are downsides to post revisions, especially if you are the only author of your blog:

MySQL database grows unnecessarily

Let’s say you just started a new blog a few weeks back and you managed to create 20 posts. If those 20 posts got edited or changed 5 times each, you will technically have around 100 posts stored in the database. That’s a lot of posts that you don’t have. This caused the size of WordPress database to grow and use up space unnecessarily.

Slow Database performance

MySQL is a pretty solid and robust database, but bloating it with unnecessary content, such as post revisions, can have a detrimental performance impact on your WordPress blog, especially in the long run. In other words, you may notice a delay when saving new posts, loading your blog or making other changes that involved WordPress database.

In order to turn off and disable Post Revisions in WordPress, add the following line to your wp-config.php:

define (’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

wp-config.php can found on the root directory of your WordPress installation folder. If your WordPress is self-hosted and you are using cPanel Control Panel, go to File Manager, then click WWW folder icon. You should be able to locate the folder of your WordPress and click the right folder icon. With cPanel, you can edit wp-config.php by clicking the file from the list and Edit File from the top right hand side. This saves you downloading (if you don’t have a copy), changing and then uploading wp-config.php.

Once wp-config.php is saved with the line above, WordPress will no longer save post revisions in the MySQL database, except AutoSave ones, which are not saved after you done saving the post.