I have had some problem with Pidgins “Waiting for network connection” (on my Linux-machine). Apparently the problem involved Gnomes NetworkManager. After a lot of searching I found an easy solution that worked for me. I use the -f option when starting Pidgin which tells it to ignore NetworkManager. You can add it in your Shortcut/Launcher if you don’t want to use commandline. If it doesnt work you might found a solution here.

If you are a Windows user I guess that the problem could be related to your networkconnection somehow.

Today I needed a fix for pgAdmin on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucis Lynx, which is my workstation (pgAdmin is a graphical ui for PostgreSQL database). To my dispair it just closed down when I tried to start it. Luckily I found a solution in this bugreport. I compiled my own and could continue to work.

This is what I did (note: I don’t garuantee it will work for you, I am not a software developer).

apt-get source pgadmin3
sudo apt-get install debhelper libpq-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev autotools-dev devscripts
cd pgadmin3-1.10.2
dpkg-buildpackage
sudo dpkg -i ../pgadmin3_1.10.2-1_i386.deb

Today I made an easy upgrade to WordPress 3.0.1, automatic and thanks to my great webhost (swedish webhost Binero.se) I can get around the FTP-account form in WordPress. I just set some constants for method and permissions in wp-config.php:

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define( 'FS_METHOD', 'direct' );
define( 'FS_CHMOD_DIR', 0755 );
define( 'FS_CHMOD_FILE', 0644 );

How easy this made my life, since I tend to lot of Worpress blogs. If you want to learn some great configuration tips for your wordpressblog check out this article on digwp, theres a lot to do then just easy updates.

The WordPress Random Post Box plugin is updated to work in WordPress 3.0. You can download the new version 1.0.3 from the plugin directory.

The problem and solution
It was a simple fix but hard to find. As mentioned by Fabian Anderwald (thanks Fabian) files not loaded within wordpress framework now needs to include the file wp-load.php instead of wp-blog-header.php, a change in WordPress that might be a problem for all integrating WordPress in other applications. This also affected my ajax-call in Random Post Box plugin. So, if you are a developer and run in to the same proble change this:

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require('./wp-blog-header.php');

To this:

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require('./wp-load.php');

There was also a warning generated from an array, a bug which also had an easy fix.

The original post about the plugin »

Today I really needed to find and replace in many files at once, and found this great feature to exists in Quanta. I have actually not seen it before. The menuitem says “Edit“->”Find in files” so one might think it doesn’t replace. But it does :) It’s a part of KWebDev that is named KFileReplace, and is also included in Quanta. A function that saved my day.

KFileReplace in Quanta

A PHP problem that tends to sneak by is the handling of strtolower and encoding. For a while now I have worked on a project that is partially on a Windows-server, with limited control for us. Sometimes there is trouble when you make comparison of textstrings and want to use strtolower. Since “Mattias” and “mattias” is not the same thing you want to make both strings lowercse. But strtolower() don’t want to play with for example swedish chars "å,ä,ö" in UTF-8.

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$value = htmlentities($value, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$value = trim(strtolower($value));
$value = html_entity_decode($value, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');