A Mind @ Play

A friend of mine was having a strange problem with her Dell XPS system, whereby the active area of the mouse cursor would move with apparent randomness, occasionally being located as it should be at the arrow’s point, sometimes at its middle, other times half an inch below. This post led us to the solution that a simple graphics driver update was required, coincidentally for the same ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card.

Came across this rather useful little mobile phone hack on AfriGadget some while ago. Nice to see ideas from the end-user finally working their way into the manufactured product. Whilst there are dual-SIM phones now available, hopefully such ingenuity may find its way into the mainstream. With the benefit of being able to seamlessly switch between two (or more) SIM cards for better price tariffs etc., and until such time as there is a true European provider, it would be rather nice to be able to use a ‘local’ number on one’s travels without having to carry about a collection of assorted SIMs that have to be swapped and changed every time you cross a border.

Plugins can be a major boon. They can add variety to a site, integrate third party software, collect feedback, improve navigation, or add features. Occasionally they may become integral to the way a blog is run. But they can also become a burden or a major stumbling point. The recent WordPress 2.5 release made a large of plugins for the software incompatible, and outright broke a few. In those cases where plugins simply provide some added extraneous functionality, such breakages might not be a problem, but where they form an integral part of a blog the potential changes can bring a site to a halt.

Yet some downtime during a WordPress update is not the only worry when it comes to plugins. Whilst major updates often accentuate the problems, there is no guarantee that plugin authors will continue their work to cope with bugs and software changes. The small WPPA plugin currently used on this blog was recently broken by the WordPress update, but the author considered that the features introduced in the recent version might make his plugin obsolete, and only touched up the plugin to work with 2.5 (so far). Since I hardly post any photographs, such a change makes little difference to this site, but for many others migrating to another plugin could prove a major job if automated tools aren’t available. Others may have experienced such changes when moving between multilingual plugins as the features and support changed, from Language Picker, through Polyglot, to Language Switcher or WP_Multilingual. Such a migration might involve moving media around, altering themes, or having to change tags or syntax within WordPress posts.

How do you approach using plugins on WordPress? Do you consider WordPress should avoid leave extra features to the plugin authors rather than implementing features already well covered (e.g. tags, photos)? Should plugin authors attempt to implement migration tools or leave it to end-users to do the necessary conversions?

Courtesy of Caro, here’s my contributory few lines from The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold C. Schonberg, page 123, three sentences from the fifth one on:

And, indeed, the coda of the first movement, with its slippery, chromatic bass and the awesome moans above it, remains a paralyzing experience. That is the way the world ends. It is absolute music, but it clearly represents struggle, and it is hard to hear so monumentally anguished a cry without reading something into it. The trouble is that face with such music, all of us tend to become sentimentalists, reading into it the wrong message.

So he sums up the Ninth Symphony of that “Revolutionary from Bonn” as the chapter title has it. A pretty decent book on the whole. And yes I realise that was four sentences.

Now the bigger question of who to pass this on to. Let’s see if and how Steffi, Heliologue and Rob respond.

It seems that occasionally, Windows Vista users can encounter a rather nasty bug which leaves them unable to log in to their system. If this is their only user profile, this can leave for a very distressing moment, particularly if the user is unfamiliar with Windows’ Safe Mode or various options available on the Vista DVD. The user is confronted with an error message such as the following:

The user profile service service failed the login. User profile cannot be loaded.

Or in German versions:

Die Anmeldung des Dienstes “Benutzerprofildienst” ist fehlgeschlagen. Das Benutzerprofil kann nicht gestartet werden.

From what I can gather, it appears that this problem occurs during Vista’s attempt to create a restore point. The user profile is backed up but no replacement is made. Thus these errors are most often seen after the installation of some new software or drivers, or after a Windows update, which may occur in the background with many users unaware of its activity.

Fortunately, some solutions are available, although not all appear to work in certain circumstances. Nigels blog offers a solution to restore the backup profile by editing the Windows registry. To do this, users need to:

1. Start the machine, and press F8 before Vista begins to load, choosing Safe Mode.
2. Search for the programme ‘regedit’ from the Start menu.
3. On opening this programme, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
4. Affected profiles can be located by the extension ‘.bak’. This extension should be deleted, the RefCount value should be 0, and the State value should be 0. Change accordingly and reboot the system.

German readers may also refer to this forum post.

Unfortunately this solution appears not to work in all cases. Since this problem generally appears to occur following a Windows Update or other software installation, however, it is equally possible to restore the system to a prior state and restore the working profile(s) to how they were before the incident. This might result in some strange behaviour or odd errors in some programmes, but these problems should only be minor ones. To do this

1. Start the machine in Safe Mode (hitting F8 before Vista loads, as above)
2. Search for the programme ‘rstrui’ in the Start menu.
3. On running the programme, the user should be presented with the option of restoring the system to the most recent restore point (recommended). Restore and restart.
4. Should the recommended option fail to solve the problem, follow the same procedure but use an older restore point. Hopefully one or other should do the trick.

Hopefully with the gradual rollout of Vista Service Pack 1, this type of problem will become less frequent.

With the news that WordPress Photo Album plugin potentially contains a security vulnerability, I decided it was probably time that I took stock of my increasingly long plugins list and removed some of the outdated and superfluous items. One of the greatest improvements to WordPress of late has been the automatic update checks provided for plugins listed on the official site, which whilst by no means universal does at least mean that updates for many popular plugins will automatically be reported without the need to check up on each one manually. This little list of what remains represents some of the better plugins I’ve encountered.

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Finally some sense from the government on Britain’s energy problems. Of course, I’m a complete cynic when it comes to discussing ‘carbon footprints’ and ‘global warming’, but there can be little denying the potential problems facing Britain’s energy industry if nothing is planned to replace the current collection of ageing and decommissioned nuclear facilities. Many cite the inherent dangers of nuclear energy and point to the potential for a repeat of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, and the issue of dealing with the radioactive waste materials. But since these issues affect the entire planet, it seems a rather moot point to debate whether nuclear energy is ’safe’ to be used in Britain, since its nearest neighbour is a predominantly nuclear powered nation. Aside from promoting micro-generation and energy efficiency in the home, the idea of building a green energy economy principally based on wind power seems frankly absurd.

Sadly, the news doesn’t come without other considerations, since the government refuses any public funding to new nuclear plants except in cases of dangerous emergency.