phipster

Man, I saw the link to the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, and I thought “Yeah, right, like this is really gonna work”. But WP’s been bugging me to upgrade from version 2.3.something every time I log in, and it’s a Friday night, and I can’t be bothered fishing around on the WordPress site to read up on how to do the upgrade, and it’s a pain to do the backups, so I went for it.

And you know what? It Just Worked. Migrated all my stuff, kept all my plugins (although, it didn’t reactivate them, maybe it wasn’t supposed to, I don’t remember). Otherwise, it was killer - good feedback, lotsa hand holding and reassurance along the way. Fetched, unpacked and installed the whole thing. Click, click click. And now I have a spiffy new WordPress 2.5.1 install.

Best part? It’s free. I made a donation to Keith nonetheless, because he made the upgrade so easy, and to encourage him to keep up the good work. If you’ve been putting off a WP, hop on over to Keith’s site, grab the plugin and try it. I think you’ll be happy, and support him, too.

As John promised,
Zero to 60 with Pylons in just minutes (Part 2) is online! Now if I only had the time to play with this stuff…

I checked out some code files from Razor (don’t ask, we use an old CM system), created a couple of new ones, now I want to quickly double-check which of the thousands of files in our source tree are the ones I checked out or created (don’t ask, we use an old CM system), so I can check the changes back in and introduce the new files (if I forget, guess who gets the wooden spoon for breaking the build):

So fire up a DOS prompt and type in:

C:\path to my code\>dir *.cpp *.h *.vcproj
/b /s /a:-r > \usafipd\updated_files.txt


This says “list all of the code files and Visual Studio project files from here on down that are writeable (i.e. not locked by Razor), then dump the results to a file in case there are hundreds of filenames to review.

This gives me a file, updated_files.txt, containing a nice list of all the .cpp, .h and .vcproj (Visual Studio project) files I checked out (i.e. made writeable).

The book The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t See, cited in John Battelle’s book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, describes the problem posed by the unsearchable areas of the Web, such as subscription-only databases. Intrigued, I scooted over to the Invisible Web’s companion website, only to find the web is actually just a little bit more invisible than I thought: