I spent this afternoon digging around my backups, and I was lucky to find my site backup from the end of 2008. I had to find a way to import the posts from WordPress 2.6 into WordPress 3.5.1. Since I had a full site backup, I was able to load the WordPress files and database backup onto my Mac’s local MAMP web development environment (Windows users might use WAMP). From there, I followed the WordPress upgrade procedure. I upgraded directly from WordPress 2.6 to 3.5.1 directly without a hitch, although it recommended to go version by version. Then with a Continue Reading
Computers & Technology
Using Mac’s Automator to Make Diffing Easier
Recently I’ve been needing an easy way to paste two versions of a text, and get the differences between the texts, specifically changes within a line (most diff programs only show which lines have changed). After some searching, DiffMerge came up as one of the best free diff programs that would work on the Mac. DiffMerge is great in many aspects, however, it lacked the interface to paste in text to diff right off the start. I set out using Mac’s Automator tool to create an application to prompt the user for two texts, create the temporary files, then pass it into DiffMerge. Continue Reading
Make Word spell check uppercase words
It’s a little known fact that Microsoft Word by default does not spell check uppercase words. I had the opportunity to read through many co-op resumes from a couple universities this past week, and the typos I’ve seen seem to support this observation. The problem comes when you have a section heading in capitals, such as “ACHIVEMENTS” or “RELEVENT SKILLS”. Microsoft Word by default doesn’t indicate that the spelling is wrong! I’m not sure why this “feature” is enabled by default, as I’d think it would be better to have more false positives than to have typos go undetected. In Continue Reading
Sweeping the disks
Every now and then it’s necessary to make some extra room on the disks. I’ve found a set of free tools that helps me see what is taking up all the space. JDiskReport (Multi-platform) JDiskReport presents multiple views for getting the statistics of file sizes. The default view is a pie chart showing the sizes of each of the subfolders in the current selected folder. Alternate views are included to determine the file types that use the most space, largest files in the entire tree, file size and file age. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other Java-supported Continue Reading
Updating VMware ESXi
Back in January I built a VMware ESXi 5 whitebox as my home server. I updated the hypervisor today and I thought I’d record the process so that I can refer back to it later. The blog post I found most useful was from VMware Front Experience. If you’re looking for the detailed procedures, I’d suggest you look at that post. Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1 The upgrade file can be found here on the VMware download site. For an upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1, the file to download is: VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-799733-depot.zip. After downloading the file, scp it to the ESXi host, Continue Reading