I’ve been using wp-hascash for a while not and it was a bit of a pain in the ass to setup at first.  There’s making sure you have the wp_head called before the closing </head> tag and comment_form called before the closing </form> tag in comments. But I started running into another error that was visibly manifesting itself as my other scripts on the page failing to fire and thus some visuals all out of whack.

After digging around a bit in the debugger and google I found this little bit of info that has fixed every issue I’ve had with wp-hashcash in the last few version of WordPress and wp-hashcash.

Error: document.getElementById(”wphc_value”) is null

so as to avoid this, it’d better to check beforehand if it’s null. So to say:
change line 372 from
echo “addLoadEvent(function(){document.getElementById(’wphc_value’).el.value=wphc();});\n”;

to:
echo “addLoadEvent(function(){var notNullWphc= document.getElementById(’wphc_value’); if(notNullWphc){notNullWphc.value=wphc();}});\n”;

Hopefully this will help folks out there suffering form the same “WTF?!” situation.

P.S. wp-hashcash works very well.

WARNING: Doing this with FileVault on will lock you out of the files in the user directory.  Pretty much for ever.  Double check.  It’s not on by default.  But you never know.  And access to the key chain can be a littel fowled up.  Just nuke it and start over.

I recently picked up a PowerBook from a friend.  Oh how long I have lusted after the PowerBook.  And let me tell you.  It’s SO sexy. I mean, I have a BlackBook, technically a superior machine.  But this… this is like race car sexy….aaaany who.  That’s not the point.  Point is he gave it to me and didn’t give me the password.  After some googling around I found the answer, as follows:

• Reboot the system and hold down Command(Apple key) - S
• At the prompt type: /sbin/fsck -y
• and then: /sbin/mount -uw /
• and finally: passwd <username>

What this does is reboot into single user mode (Oh Noes!  Command Line!  Text!!!).  Then the next two commands (Listed above the prompt in Leopard) will mount in read/write mode the file system (You really don’t need to know this) and lastly typing passwd followed by the user whose password you want to change will prompt you for a new password and ask you to verify it.

Reboot and you’re done!

Even more wonderous polls to enlighten and amuse you!

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Have at them! Know that your answers for the last polls were educational indeed and helped, at least in my eyes, settle a debate.  I’ll leave it to you as to which one it was.

Since I post so infrequently on this site sometimes thoughts back up.  In this case thoughts that include polls that can’t really be quickly blasted out across twitter. So here are two that have come up in conversation lately.

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Let’s see if this thing can handle two polls in one post.  As always, thank you all for participating in this very scientific research.  Your donations to the common knowledge go far behind simply amusement.  They… no.. who am I kidding… it’s all for a chuckle.

I’ve been having issues with Vista, of course.  It can get into a state where SOMETHING on the system freaks out and I can’t even pull task manager up.  I can see it’s icon in the dock going all crazy, but I can’t bring up the task list window and try and fix problems.

What I really wanted was top for windows.  But I couldn’t find that, sometimes being all graphical is a bad thing. But I did manage to find something close enough to what i was looking for: taskkill.  Use it thusly,

taskkill /IM taskmgr.exe

This should kill off that pesky process/app gone mad.  As it was I ran it on task manager and my system returned to normal. So next time you need to kill something like firefox and task manager just won’t come up - how likely is that, really? - try taskkill.

P.S. I have a Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0Ghz system with 2 Gigs of RAM and my experience “Rating” is 3.4.

I loath you, Vista.

I’ve been trying to remember to blog I’ve got a number of good fixes to document including wp-hascash error corrections and getting wifi to work properly in Ubuntu with an Atheros chipset. But I’m just so overwhelmed with work and life. Oh well. Soon.

So, there I am getting my lunch at a chain eatery. I have their stupid little club card and decide to cash it in and pay for some of my meal with it. After much sliding of cards and punching of touch screens the clerk finally tells me I’ll owe .54 cents. So I make to hand him my debit card and he looks at me like I’ve just shit in my hand and I’m now trying to hand it to him.

“No. No mang. We canna do that. 54 cents no. You got cash?”

“No, I don’t have cash. Just my card. Just run it.” I hand it again.

“No, not 54 cent. We take charge for that. Not 54 cent.” he continues to stare at me like I’m hiding money in my pocket, and just won’t give it to him.

“Not my problem. Just run it.”

“You no want sandwich then?”

“*sighs* just keep the chips.” I give in.

“There you take your free sandwich.” he sneers at me and goes back to making sandwiches.

Oh, my free sandwich? Yeah, we have an agreement. You’re offering me these silly points if I’ll eat at your place and fill your system with my sales statistics. So let’s not act like you, joe sandwich slinger, have just bent over backwards and given me food from your kids mouths.

But, that attitude isn’t really my complaint. I’m annoyed that companies will always have this Atlas’ burden take on the surcharge for purchase below certain amounts or for using debit for gas. Buck the hell up. It’s not my problem. Don’t put your operating expenses off on me, in my face.

I don’t come in to work and tell my boss, “I had a crappy time getting out of bed this morning and had a flat tire on the way in. You’re gonna need to give me $50 out of pocket for today.”

Noooo I have that kind of thing wrapped up in what I make. Maybe I get a cost if living raise once a year. That’s how it works. And if I can’t swing it on what I’m making I change jobs to raise my salary. I don’t flipping nit pick my boss everytime I see him.

It’s your business. Don’t throw the fact that it costs you more to run sub $5 charges in my face. Structure your pricing to deal with it. And stop complaining about taking my money. Jeez. Pisses me off.

I don’t know how many times I’ve stared down gas station attendents over crap like this. Your problem. Not mine. Run your business or don’t.

And don’t get me started on places that only take cash. OMG! Catch up with the world, people.

And then there are stores that close before I even get off work. So you WANT to fail? All these businesses so don’t want my money!

*heaving chest and smashed keyboard*

Okay, got that off my chest. Have a nice day.

So, one of the new features on the iPhone is A-GPS. When I heard about everyone and their brothers complaining that the 1st gen iPhone lacked gps I couldn’t see the point of all the fuss. Certainly if you’ve bought such an expensive phone you know where you are at all times. Or are at least within a block of a street sign. Let’s face it, it’s probably not a good idea to drag this thing out into the woods camping either.

But there has been one use I’ve had in the back of my mind. And now that I’ve got the new phone I’ve decided to give geocaching a try. (www.geocaching.com) What had also seemed silly and pointless at first, kept growing on me and now the two initially pontless things have met and given each other purpose.

I started going after my first “cache” yesterday and took a little stroll down the street from my office. The gps worked pretty well and the cache was simple to find. But it really sparked a fire with the realization that these things are everywhere and only a few of us know about them. I signed the small log included in the cache and then swapped out an item for the next person to find. All the while trying to act subtle and inconspicuous as I retrieved and then returned the cache to it’s hiding place.

I mean, what kid hasn’t wanted to be a spy at one point or another. And now I see the appeal.

So today at lunch I headed off to do a multi-waypoint cache. With a multi-waypoint the first coordinates you get lead you to a clue that you use to figure out the coordinates of the next. You’ll hop from waypoint to waypoint until you find the cache.

On this second trip I learned a few things. First, trust your first gut reaction. I stood next to the first item for a few minutes while I fiddled with the gps and read the clues. I knew it was there but just didn’t look good and hard.

The second was, maybe I need to get a good pair of gloves. I was feeling around under the lid of a light when I felt webs and debris. I pulled my hand out and down came this guy(see photo at bottom). I swear I don’t know how I wasn’t bitten.

In the end my lunch break timed out and I was a little too aprehensive to start combing the place. (You’re supposed to be sly and collected so as not to give the cache away to people who aren’t playing and might walk off with the loot.)

I tried another cache a few hours ago with the kids. I told them we were on treasure hunt and I thought they might really get into it. Boy did they ever. They made a point of trying to ask everyone who walked by if they could help us find the treasure.

In the end I didn’t find the last cache on that one either. Though it’s hard to do some good searching when you’re paranoid and your kids are screaming “Did you find the twessure yet?!” Plus I think I might have had to reach way down into some rocks and I’d learned that lesson earlier in the day.

So anywho. I’ll likely keep looking. The people are friendly (the owner of the cache I found emailed me and was encouraging), it’s fun being a spy with gadgets, and it’s something to get you outdoors and moving around.

There are many more details to the whole thing but I’ve already gone over my usual 140 characters. So hit www.geocaching.com and look into it if you’re intersted.

Hey, look at this. The wordpress guys put out an iPhone app. Pretty damn handy. Now I can fire off a blog post from anywhere. Hopefully this can help my blog compete for my attention against Twitter.

Anywho, hopefully this will breath a little life into the blog though, I have to admit that the lack of cut and past is going to make it a real pain in the ass to do links to articles and other sites. Oh well, we’ll see.

So, there’s a swell in the murmuring about Ctr-Alt-Chicken. It’s been almost two years since the last episode and I for one am STILL chomping at the bit for the next one.

So here’s my idea:

Alex, among others have asked us to follow them on twitter.  Now that he’s got gobs and gobs of us listening to his every move, let’s turn that around and let him know that we want more CTRL-ALT-Chicken. On Monday June 30th at 12:00 Noon Pacific Coast Pacific everyone tweet @alexalbrecht with “CTRL-ALT-Chicken”. Hopefully enough of us can make the point that we’re still interested in the show - and he’s said that the project isn’t dead yet.

That’s it. Spread the word. At the very least we can drop twitter, again.  But that’s like beating a dead horse.

Monday June 30th @ 12:00 Noon Pacific Coast Time

@alexalbrecht : CTRL-ALT-Chicken