Water in Cochabamba and Bolivia
This post is my contribution for Blog Action Day 2010 (October 15, 2010), a day in which many people around the world blog about the same subject. The subject this year is water. As I already wanted to write something about the water(supply) in Cochabamba this is an excellent opportunity to do it now.
Ebooks in South America
My wife and I are staying in Bolivia for a year, in the city of Cochabamba. In order not to have to drag along suitcases full of books we both have an ereader. But for the rest the theme of ‘ebooks’ is something that isn’t alive here in Bolivia. On the Mobileread forum I have seen someone from Bolivia and a couple of people from Argentina but that’s it about. But last Saturday I was surprised to read an article about ebooks in one of the local newspapers.
DRM frustration stories
DRM (Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management) is a system to restrict the use of digital media (DVD’s, music, ebooks etc.), usually using encryption technology. This is mainly used by publishers of these media to prevent unauthorized copying and printing of these media. Its purpose is to restrict usage of the media to those people that legally obtained them and to restrict the usage to those actions that the publisher allows and sometimes to a set time period, e.g. when it is borrowed from a library. That looks like an acceptable purpose; however, there are several circumstances when things go wrong and the stuff can no longer be used by the person that legally acquired it. In this post I will collect links to reported cases of these kind of problems. Originally published on Jan 9, 2010. Latest update: Aug. 21, 2010.
Upgrading WordPress and WPML
My blog site (i.e. this site) was in need of an update. I hadn’t updated WordPress for quite some time. The most important reason was that the site used Gengo to make it a multilingual site with corresponding posts in English and Dutch connected.
Three months in South America
We have been three month in South America. We have had quite some experiences and done many things. So much that I didn’t have enough time to write the travel report. While writing this I realise that one quarter of our time here has already elapsed. Today I have started writing again and the result will be published soon here. For now I have put a list here of the tweets that I sent during these three month that are related to our stay in South America. Because most of them are in Dutch you have to read them in the Dutch version of this post. All times are local time.
Applescript/Python script for url shortener
I had an Applescript to use the bit.ly url shortener. In fact I had two of them: one takes the current Firefox URL as input, and the other one takes the clipboard as input. Moreover I preferred the new j.mp instead of bit.ly because it saves 2 characters.
Running Calibre on Snow Leopard
Yesterday I installed Snow Leopard on my recently bought MacBook. After installation I wanted to run Calibre (an eBook management application) because I wanted to download an eBook to my iPhone. Unfortunately Calibre completely went haywire. It was consuming about 100% CPU time, and the machine got almost completely unresponsive.
Converting WordPress from Gengo to WPML – part 2
In this post I am going to investigate the structure of categories and tags in WordPress.
Converting WordPress from Gengo to WPML – part 1
As I described in the posts about upgrading WordPress I am investigating automatic conversion from Gengo to WPML. Of course I searched in the WPML site and I found a few threads in the forum.
WordPress upgrade (2)
I have WordPress upgraded to 2.8.3 without problems. Just had to be careful about Gengo activation and the permalink refresh (see previous post). Some people have reported that Gengo wouldn’t be compatible with WordPress 2.8. With the patch that I mentioned in my previous post it does work however. But I must admit that I have been hacking in my copy of Gengo in the past so it could be that the official version still has problems that I don’t have any more.
Anyway, I think the Gengo situation is just too fragile. Therefore I am now investigating the WPML plugin. More about that in a later posting.
Update August 22, 2009: Although reading the site now seems to work with my patch to Gengo, I experience problems on the Admin page. Some of the popups don’t work e.g. in the `Edit a post’ page.
