Living It Up

Just as there are venomous scumbags who derive some cretinous pleasure from hacking people’s blogs and ICQ accounts (damn you hackers!  May you rot in Internet hell!), there’re also some altruistic folks who willingly share their IT knowledge with novices like me.

The most recent kind soul I’ve met online is Kelwin.  After he read the "line spacing" problem with the ballerina WP theme I wanted to use, he checked the stylesheet and taught me how to get the spacing there myself.  The codes (other stylesheets may have slightly different codes).  This was how my problem was solved:

===========================

p {
    padding:0px 0px 0px 0px;
    margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;
}

These two lines define how each paragraph will look like.  Notice four sets of 0px each for padding and margin.

The first figure represents the top padding/margin.
The second figure represents the right padding/margin.
The third figure represents the bottom padding/margin.
The forth figure represents the left padding/margin.

In this case, it was defined such that the paragraphs do not have any spaces between them at all (notice 0 pixels top and bottom).

To solve this, change the margins for the top (or bottom) to a value bigger than 0. 

An example of the new code should look like below:

p {
    padding:0px 0px 0px 0px;
    margin:0px 0px 15px 0px;
}

===========================

And he was right!  Tada!  I got the ballerina theme with the line spacing I want and I learnt something new about codes.  I’m really glad about this.  The only dilemma is.. I also like the current "bunny laundry line" theme which I ripped from a blogspot skin… heh.  So I can’t decide which theme to use now!

Oh well, I suspect it’s just a matter of time before I switch back to the ballerina theme. 

Thank you Kelwin!

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My ICQ account was hacked into a couple of days ago. I always thought I could reset the password by sending a default password to an old email address used before (did this successfully a few years ago when my account was hacked).  However, it didn’t work this time.  I tried all my previous email adds (even the ICQ Help Center said this would work) but it didn’t work.

I’m very sad.  Though very few people come on ICQ these days, I HAVE had this account since 1996. I feel attached to it.  Hey, my UIN is 1837295… that’s how early a user I was.  *Sniff*.

I’m sad.  I miss my ICQ UIN.

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Decided to use this blog theme for now… realised the problem is that in order for the photos (this concerns mainly all my old entries) to display correctly in this theme, I need to set the photos to be "in line" instead of being "left" or "right" of the text and obviously I have way too many entries to change the picture alignment setting one by one. 

In addition, each paragraph does not have a extra line separating the 2 blocks of text.  Sigh.  But I do like the colours and the ballet dancers in the header.  Any solutions anyone?  I guess I’ll use this for now… till I can’t take it anymore…

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     I searched through the 4 WP theme sites recommended by Kelwin.  Found 1 that I particularly liked… and some others that I uploaded into my themes folder for possible future use.  Here’re some screenshots:

     This is the one I really like.  Unfortunately, it’s not widgetised and when I checked the FAQ on how to widgetise it, I decided it was too "cheem" (difficult) for me to implement.

     This was my next favourite and it’s widget-ready… except that the paragraphs are like mashed together… which makes posts difficult to read.  *Sniff*.

     I thought this wasn’t too bad either… and if you imagine hard enough, you will see that the little girl is carrying a bunny.  Hehe.  Not sure if it’s widget ready though.  (Haven’t tested it).

     This isn’t too bad either… but… somehow… not quite my style.  Hmm… can’t place a finger on it.  Sigh.

     So how?  Should I use Chobit (the first one) for a while?  But that would mean I can’t load the chatbox nor my nuffnang ad banner (if they would blardy serve me some ads!).  Sigh.

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I am sad.  Truly sad.  I just spent the last 2 hours searching for "girly, feminine, cute, sweet, bunny" WordPress themes but found none.  I think WP designers do not understand the meaning of "girly, feminine" and so on.  A few websites were proclaiming excitedly about some girly/feminine themes and an example of what these sites considered "girly" is this:

I’m not saying that that theme is ugly.  But tell me, in what way is it feminine or girly?  Just ‘cos there’s damn pink feather there?!?  Similarly, these are not girly.  They are more kiddie than anything!

What I consider sweet and girly would be any of the designs found on this site.  My favourite being these:

Unfortunately, such sweet themes are only available for Blogspot users.  I even considered going back to Blogspot since it supports external hosting sites too.  But I think the features in Blogspot are more limited… but I’m not sure.  Maybe I should talk to my webmaster after his wedding…

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Was prompted to do an auto Windows upgrade.  Not sure which product Windows was trying to upgrade but my MSN started displaying an error message everytime I booted up my laptop.  In the end, I uninstalled MSN and manually downloaded and installed MSN 2009 (beta).  The display’s not bad.  Each line typed is prefixed with a bullet point.  Makes the chat window a lot neater.

My Windows Live Writer was upgraded along with MSN.  Photos now can be done in various styles.  Really cool.  Hehe.  Best of all, there’s finally an option to have pictures aligned at the centre of the blog post.  Previously, Live Writer could only position it left or right and in order to get a pic in the centre of the post, I had to manually edit the HTML. 

I’m quite pleased with these 2 new versions so far.  Only drawback is that there doesn’t seem to be a compatible version of Msg Plus available for MSN 2009 yet.  *Sniff*.

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My blog got hacked again.  Only discovered it last night when I tried to post the entry about my first day (which is Sun) in Bangkok and got the damn "parse error" again.  Logged into Yahoo webhost and true enough, my index.php and xmlprc.php file got edited on 4 Oct 2008.  Sky happened to be online so I told him about it.  Even he was surprised that my blog seemed to be getting hacked so often given that my password is really quite secure (consists of special characters, capital letters, numbers and with no proper word).  The only reason he could think of is there may be some weakness in my Yahoo and/or SQL database setup and I really can’t be sure ‘cos I have no idea how the technical aspects of it work.  Anyway, Sky happens to offer webhosting services too so I decided (on the spot) to switch to his.

The price he charges is very reasonable and he helped me shift my entire blog to his server.  Will have to work out with him how to upload files via FTP, as well as figure out a way to shift my email adds to his server.  He helped me sort out the entire migration till 4am last night.  (THANK YOU!!).  I sure hope he wasn’t working today.  Haha. 

Once everything is sorted out, I’m going to dump Yahoo for good.  Though convenient (and I loved the Snapshots Backup feature), it’s getting very costly to host it with them.  I got an email just 2 weeks ago saying that the price is going up by USD1 from USD11.95 to USD12.95 per month.  It’s ridiculous.  The biggest benefit I see about hosting with Sky is that I know him and I know I’ll be able to approach him for help.  At least with a friend as a webmaster, I don’t mind telling him my password if need be, for him to help troubleshoot and then changing it to a new password thereafter so I can’t hold him liable for any subsequent security lapses either.

As it is, I already noticed a few improvements to my blog/Wordpress interface.  For e.g., the "index.php" has been removed from my my pretty permalinks.  (This is probably ‘cos this is now a clean installation of the latest Wordpress compared to the upgrade I did on my own).  Also, there’re more theme options in my Wordpress admin panel.  Better still, the plugins that I deleted when fixing the damn 4 Oct hack have also been added back for me.  Whoopee!!

Anyway, I really hope this puts a stop to the hacking of my blog once and for all.  Damn you chao hackers!

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Was invited by a friend recently to attend a "Landmark" seminar.  Didn’t want to reject a friend outright as I would a telemarketer.  So I went to check out the website for more info.  The layout of the website looked professional enough but I couldn’t figure out what the heck were they offering.  It looked like another of those self-help / motivational course type of seminars (which I’m skeptical of) but everything was just so ambiguous.  So I did a search online regarding "Landmark Education" and good grief!  France has listed it as a group with cult-like traits.

Sure, there were positive reviews of the seminar and how it transformed lives - but those testimonials were found on Landmark’s website.  Not very impartial I would say.  Other websites and forums had scathing criticisms of it… and there were even some lawsuits initiated by people who suffered mental breakdown after attending the seminars (allegedly due to the brainwashing techniques used).

To be fair, I think those who sufferered mentally already had emotional issues to start with… and these issues were exacerbated by the verbal abuse participants are subjected to at the forum.  That said… why would anyone pay money to get scolded? 

Anyway, I rejected my friend’s invitation to attend a seminar.  I can just see myself having a cat fight with any course leader that tries to scold me on stage in front of all the participants.  Hmm… if anything, I may end up abusing the course leader till he/she cries.  That would be funny.  Hehe.  Maybe I should attend on one of those bad weeks where everything goes wrong and I need to vent my frustrations.  :P 

Talking about venting frustrations… my mood is most foul in the morning.  I am so not a morning person.  Waking up early, rushing to get ready for work, getting stuck behind slow coaches at the MRT station and jostling for space in a crowded train puts me in an absolutely pissed off mood.  However, a new toy I bought over the weekend has made packed morning train rides a lot more bearable.  Please give a round of applause to the Nintendo DS Lite! 

I bought a deep red DS Lite over the weekend.  Found the games a little too childish/girly at first… and didn’t really like the fact that most games had to be played with the stylus.  That’s till I got hooked on Space Invaders!  Yes!  The (I think) 30-year old game.  It’s sooooo captivating that when I was stuck at Cityhall MRT this morning due to a train fault, I wished the fault would last longer (despite being late for work).  Heh.  I think the DS Lite is a good motivational tool.  It makes me more cheery and forgiving in the morning.  I’ve been brainwashed by aliens.  Woohoo!

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Been using WP 2.6.2 the past few days to great satisfaction.  The bug on the Admin Panel Comments section got resolved too.  My pretty permalink isn’t quite cosmetically perfect but that’s another issue all together.  Since the index.php workaround works, I’m not very bothered.

Anyway, for those who weren’t aware, everytime you do an upgrade, you should compare your existing wp-config.php file with the new installation file which is named wp-config-sample.php.  Either transfer your settings to the sample-file and rename it to wp-config.php or copy the new statements from the sample file into your current file.  Don’t do a simple overwrite else your customised settings will be gone!!  It’s important to compare the statements because different versions of WP may have different authentication keys / secret keys that help harden your blog again spam attackers!

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Just a log so I remember what I’ve done…

5 Sep 08 - Blog got hacked by those damn spam injection bots again

6 Sep 08 - I realise the hack and also found out that the Secret Key for WP 2.5 & WP 2.6 is different.  (Mine wasn’t updated after the upgrade).

7 Sep 08 - Finally manage to get the new Secret Key to work (something wrong with my coding on previous attempt).

7 Sep 08 night - Realised I couldn’t log into my Admin Panel.  Tried everything suggested in the forums - changing mysql password, resetting Admin Panel login pwd, etc.  I even went backwards and loaded my blog snapshot as of 24 Aug but still caught in endless wp-login.php loop.  Gave up, posted on forum asking for help.

8 Sep 08 - Another WP user said what worked for him was disabling all plug-ins one by one… different plugins were the cause of the problem for different users.  Tried & worked!  My culprit plugin was the WP Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Lesson learnt?  Not all blog problems can be solved in 1 day… and the forums are a GREAT help. 

I wasn’t as frustrated this time as I was the last… heh… but I do note that I need to learn to be patient… that’s something I didn’t inherit from my dad unfortunately.  He’s the most patient trouble-shooter I’ve seen. 

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My blog got hacked again.  Sigh.. but I managed to fix it (took me 2 days.. finally got it straightened out today).  Anyway, I suspect it’s ‘cos the secret key for WP 2.5 is different from the one for 2.6 and I’m running WP 2.6 now.

For more info, do read here.  I’ve also reported to yahoo webhost that the auto WP upgrade function isn’t working and they’re looking into that.  They also gave some instructions on how to do a proper upgrade… no time to look at it now… but will do it soon.  Meanwhile, hope my blog stays attack free.

DAMN U HACKERS & SPAM BOTS!

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Good grief!  I have no idea why this is happening but I got my permalinks to HALF work.

My permalinks (before the 2.6 nightmare) used to be in the format:
http://uptowngal.org/blog/2008/08/19/sample-post/

Then WP 2.6 came and they got all broken and nothing could fix it.

After the upgrade to 2.6.1, they still didn’t work.  HOWEVER, by selecting a "Custom Structure" in my permalinks setting page and using:
/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

I now get this:
http://uptowngal.org/blog/index.php/2008/08/19/if-i-could-take-a-pic/

So I get my post name as part of the URL, but there’s this "index.php" there.  Anyone knows why?!?!??

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Damnit!  Just realised I’m going to have to set aside time to fix the damn permalinks bug because unless WP 2.6.1 comes out REALLY REALLY soon, all my previous blog entries, where I made url references to other blog entires, would now become a broken link!  Grr…

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A constant pain in the neck with using Meebo in office is that messages tend to go missing.  I’m not sure if this is a Meebo problem or my office network problem (dropped connection) but it is a real pain when you’re constantly unsure if your messages reached the other party.

The worst hit victim of this missing messages problem is Iceman (I suppose that’s ‘cos I talk to him the most on Meebo).  We’ve developed a habit of copying and pasting our messages if we don’t get a response after 5-10min.  Of course, sometimes, the other party is away from the computer and hence there’s no response.  But other times, this lack of response is because the other party never received the message.  Even the copy and paste text can go missing a couple of times… which means sometimes we can end up pasting the same message 3-4 times before it actually goes through.

On particularly bad days, Iceman and I resort to using Gtalk as an alternative IM to communicate.  Sadly, Gtalk disconnects pretty regularly too… but the mitigating factor is that when Gtalk is disconnected, there is an error prompt to notify me that the message did not go through. 

This missing messages irritation culminated in a really crappy incident last night.  I originally arranged to meet Iceman for dinner at 7pm, after which some last minute task came in from overseas and I had to resolve the issue before I could leave.  I told Iceman over Meebo to meet at 7:30pm instead… and I got an "ok, bye" from him and so I thought he got my message.  Unfortunately, Iceman’s "ok" was in response to an earlier message I typed… and he never got my message about changing the meeting time to 7:30pm.

When I finally reached at our appointed dinner venue close to 8pm, Iceman was starving and obviously puzzled why I was so late.  Then the whole missing messages thing came out and well, it was too late to do anything.  So when I got home last night, I decided to do another search on the Internet to see if there were any other IM alternatives (i.e. IMs that can get past my office firewall).  I found a website that had a whole list of the various web-based IMs available.  Amongst those listed were - www.ebuddy.com, www.iloveim.com, www.meebo.com, www.imhaha.com, imo.im, etc. 

I’m familiar with all except the last 2… and so I did a test on both.  Nothing really special about imhaha.com… but imo.im… aha!  I found a gem there.  There’s a downloadable imo.im programme that runs on Windows PCs.  It requires .NET to work and looks very very similar to Gtalk (which is small, neat and gets past most firewalls).  Tested it and it worked pretty ok so far - only 1 missing message occurrence.

This imo.im programme displays a "disconnected" status message when the IM is disconnected so as long as you don’t send a message when you’re disconnected, I think it’s reasonably stable.  Will continue testing it over the next few days but so far, it’s really lovely.  When the programme is minimised, it’s tucked away in the systray and I switched off the notification alert so nothing pops up when I receive a message.  The icons blinks discreetly in the systray and that’s it (just like ICQ).  Sweet.

I highly recommend this programme for all IM junkies! 

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tried the work around solution for the permalinks bug in Wordpress 2.6 but that unfortunately didn’t work for me.  the solution proper requires me to delve into the codes but i’m hesitant to open the floodgates of blogging hell.  the best bet for me, perhaps, is to just wait for WP 2.6.1 to be released and hopefully the bug will be fixed then.

throat started hurting again this morning.  argh.  maybe it’s ‘cos i finished the course of antibiotics last night but my body hasn’t developed enough of its own to fight off the sore throat. 

very sian.  sigh.

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