My Things Windows

A simple way to convert your Wordpress blog into a static page (W.I.P.)

2010-06-27T13:45:00.001-07:00

I'm leaving Blogger and hosting my blog on my own website. This indeed looks like SEO talk, but since the beginning I wanted to host my website and blog in the same place, but I didn't want approach Wordpress. I've tried MovableType and Drupal, but Wordpress is certainly the easiest to install and use.

The problem is I don't want to keep my blog and site "on the cloud". My approach is working "offline" then publish. Yes, it's a very old fashioned approach, but that's how I like it. I came across several plugins to generate static pages, but none of them did exactly what I wanted: a complete offline copy/mirror of my blog, independent of host, database or anything else, only pure, fully functional HTML pages.

That's when I recalled a very useful utility I used in remote times to leech pages: WGET for Windows. It works wonderfully. I have a full Wordpress blog configured locally and all I have to do is leech it and publish the content. The command line I use for thid is:

wget --no-verbose --force-directories --no-cache --no-cookies --recursive --level=inf --no-remove-listing --page-requisites --convert-links --no-parent "http://localhost:8081"

Note: W.I.P. = Work In Progress, meaning I'll return to this post whenever I find difficulties or have something worthy to add.

Note2: this obviously doesn't work for the admin control panel and comment system. I'll use Disqus Comments as my comment system, so it won't be an issue.

How to quickly obtain ssleay32.dll and libeay32.dll

2010-06-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

WGET for Windows (and other utilities) requires the OpenSSL libraries ssleay32.dll and libeay32.dll (among others) in order to run (check the Windows README). If you search for them on Google, you'll only get to confusing forum posts, artificially-ranked DLL download sites (very suspicious) and not-quite-useful process information pages. The quick solution: they're all included in the dependencies package for WGET for Win32. Get it here.

NOTE: I'm migrating this blog to WWAMP (Windows+Wordpress+Apache+MySQL+Php). I was particularly interested in MovableType and Drupal, but Perl (for the former) is horribly hard to integrate to Apache on Windows and the second isn't compatible with the current version of Php (or maybe I didn't figure it out how to make it work, but it doesn't matter, Wordpress worked nicely with comparatively much less effort).

NOTE2: ssleay32.dll can be found in Apache's MSI. package or the bin directory.

Error "not found" when activating custom permalinks in Wordpress on Apache VirtualHost

2010-06-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

I'm new to Wordpress and Apache and found a quite intriguing error: default permalinks (in the format /?p=123) work, but custom permalinks (also known as "Pretty links", in the format /yyyy/mm/dd/sample-post/) do not, spawning 404 "not found" errors. The solution resides in a link "hidden" in the Wordpress Readme.html file. Wordpress recommends Apache mod_rewrite module. If you're using VirtualHosts, you'll need to activate rewrite for each of them with the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteOptions Inherit

Additionally, you must activate the following Apache options, pointed in the official documentation, in your Wordpress directory:

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All

That's it. Check the official links above if more info is needed.

URL Shortening services threatened?

2010-06-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

The advent of Twitter's t.co shows how risky is to invest solely in supplementary applications, those without an own life apart from a main service. This could very well kill ALL url shortening services if Twitter ever decides to offer user generation of links.

Will technology help keeping endangered languages alive?

2010-06-01T05:32:00.000-07:00

Every fan of languages like myself loves (and hates, sometimes) Google Translate. It still lacks phonetic information, but I think more specialized tools will tend to this need. Economic pressures are leading to multi-polarization of a relative few languages (links to reports and data on Wikipedia), with the younger simply abandoning or never having contact with their ancestors' speak in favor of major languages. I think widespread adoption of free language technology will diminish these pressures since there will be less economic advantage in the knowledge of non-native languages.

Technorati and new site version

2010-05-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

I've submitted my blog to Technorati. I'll be updating my website in the next days (or hope so!).

Eclipse CDT x Code::Blocks

2010-04-03T15:44:00.000-07:00

I'm configuring a shared project folder for both Eclipse CDT and Code::Blocks using MinGW as compiler. In Code::Blocks, I must inform full library names, e.g., libwinmm.a while in Eclipse I must inform Windows' original names, in that case winmm. So Code::Blocks is more intuitive since you will naturally refer to the compiler package's lib files.

Code::Blocks also provides native support for Windows applications. You can create an empty project, select build target as GUI application and add a .rc file to embed resources, including the executable's icon. In order to achieve the same in Eclipse CDT, all compiler settings have to be passed manually:

GUI Application: add these linker's miscellaneous settings: -mwindows -mwin32

RC file: add this pre-build step : windres ..\resources.rc resources.o then add resources.o to linker's miscellaneous settings. The path of resources.rc must conform to the project file structure. The current directory will be the Release/Debug folder.

It may look simple, but a beginner in C/C++ programming may be in trouble to figure this out.

Using question mark on filenames... sorta

2010-02-21T10:58:00.000-08:00

Actually, you can't use question marks or any character from the reserved set (\ / : * ? " < > |) in filenames on any version of Windows. However, question marks are necessary sometimes, especially when cataloging movies and series episodes. I use alternate versions of the question mark in Unicode, such as the Spanish one (¿ U+00BF), the Arabian one (؟ U+061F) and the interrobang (‽ U+203D).

Problems migrating from Opera Mail/Outlook Express to Outlook 2007

2010-02-16T12:29:00.001-08:00

Outlook Express was discontinued in favor of Windows Mail since Windows Vista. If you have a backup with mail messages from it, you'll discover Outlook 2007 doesn't have any simple way to import them. You'll have to use Windows Live Mail (don't mistake it for Hotmail) as an intermediate: import your Outlook Express .dbx files into Windows Live Mail and then import your Windows Live Mail to Outlook 2007.

For Opera Mail, the easiest way to import the messages in .mbs format is to use Aid4Mail Professional. It will create a separate .PST file in your Outlook data folder, but it won't preserve Opera folder and account structure. You can use Aid4Mail instead of Windows Live Mail to import Outlook Express messages, if you wish.

USB wireless network adapter doesn't... work (Windows 7)

2010-02-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

If you have many USB devices, including an external wireless network adapter (Ralink), it may suddenly stop working under Windows 7. I had this problem after opening my computer's case and reconnecting the USB devices in different positions. It is not the case of a device error or driver installation failure. It was perfectly installed and only failed to transmit and detect network. I've tried a huge variety of drivers and tweaks, but only this solved the problem:

1) Delete all related drivers. This means to uninstall the device with the option to delete the driver alongside. Let Windows detect the device again and repeat the uninstallation until you get the default driver (the one that comes with Windows). If your driver doesn't come with Windows, skip this.

2) Stop and disable WLAN AutoConfig in "services.msc".

3) Open the registry editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft and delete the folder Wlansvc (this is not the service, only configurations).

4) Reboot in safe mode (F8) and choose "Safe mode with networking".

5) Delete all your network adapters (choose the option to view hidden devices) and let Windows reinstall them. If everything went well, you'll see wireless networks immediately. Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter must be present.

6) If your driver doesn't come with Windows, use the one supplied by the vendor or, preferably, a newer one.

Service hell - winmgmt - Windows Management Instrumentation

2010-01-21T10:34:00.000-08:00

Disabling the service winmgmt (Windows Management Instrumentation) has unexpected side effects. Once I disabled it and had problems with taskkill using the option /IM, which tells to kill a specific image name or pattern (example: taskkill.exe /IM iexplore.exe tries to kill all instances of Internet Explorer). Another time, Remote Desktop was not working. Windows Firewall (SharedAccess on XP) is dependent of winmgmt, so if it is set to start and fails with a dependency error, related ports will remain closed and the host will be inaccessible, even to ping requests.

First post (remade)

2010-01-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes computers can be as stubborn and complicated as human people. Sometimes I feel like a Sherlock Holmes trying to solve mysterious problems on Windows. It's when I think: "hey, I should publish that!".

Blogger has managed to place my blog on limbo from the very first post. Now I have two of them with the same URL.