July 2011 - Kevin Whitman's Blog

Month: July 2011

5 WordPress Plugins I use

I use many WordPress plugins, but here are 5 WordPress Plugins I think are great and recommend:

I use After the deadline to proofread my posts. It uses artificial intelligence to check for spelling, style and grammar. It works by sending your post to a server, and then sends the errors in your post back.

CloudFlare

CloudFlare isn’t just a WordPress plugin. It’s a reserve proxy to add distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, content distribution network (CDN), Rocket Loader and extra security. It can asynchronously load scripts. It also can minify css and scripts for you. You can use it for non WordPress sites, but you have to install a Apache mod if you want the right IP addresses of the user to show up, which may not be easy for some people or your on shared hosting which the host provider may not have it installed or will not install it. This WordPress plugin allows WordPress to get the correct IP address of the user without mod_cloudflare. You can checkout more about CloudFlare at https://www.cloudflare.com/

WP Super Cache

I use this plugin to cache my blog to static html files to speed up my site. So each reload won’t have to regenerate the whole page using PHP and MySQL and can just serve a cached version meaning less CPU on the server and quicker for the end user. So I think I’m Digg proof.

WP-DBManager

This plugin I use for backup my database. It also can optimize your database. You can manually back up or repair or have it do it every so many minutes, hours, days, weeks and months.

Akismet

I use this plugin to flag comments as spam. This is free for personal blogs. It really does catch spam really good! I just look at the spam every so often, see if anything isn’t spam and then clear it out.

Completely Uninstall Mac Apps

July 29, 2011 / Kevin / 4 Comments

I wanted to get rid of unused apps on my Mac. I knew that you can drag an application in the trash to remove it, but some apps will leave behind settings, etc. I found some paid apps to remove apps completely but since

I’m cheap so i wanted a free app. I found one! Its called AppCleaner by FreeMacSoft. It allows you to drag applications on your Mac on to it and it then searches for other files that normal uninstalling would leave behind. It then lets you delete the app and left over files.

You just drag an app or a selection of apps in into AppCleaner.

Then you press the delete button, its plays a sound and then the app and related files are in your trash to delete! Really nice and simple to use. It also allows you to uninstall widgets. I give this app 5 out of 5 stars.

LSL Serving Robot Tutorial – Part 2

July 27, 2011 / Kevin / 0 Comments

In Part 1 we added in touch support, pay support, refunding and displaying menus. In Part 2, we are going to do work in the listen event. Also note if two or more items have the same name, you may run in to a conflict. Continue reading

LSL Serving Robot Tutorial – Part 1

July 26, 2011 / Kevin / 0 Comments

I started to work on this in 2007. You could only pick 4 items from the pay menu, each had its own price.

So lets rewrite the script! We are going to create a new LSL Script and add a on_rez event to reset the when you rez the bot out of inventory. You should a script that looks like the following:

[code lang="lsl2"]
default
{
	state_entry()
	{
		llSay(0, "Hello, Avatar!");
	}

	touch_start(integer total_number)
	{
		llSay(0, "Touched.");
	}

	on_rez(integer start_param)
	{
		llResetScript();
	}

}
[/code]

A look at Lion

July 20, 2011 / Kevin / 4 Comments

After waiting every day for the last month checking Apple.com to see if Lion is available, it’s finally here! Lion is available as a download from the Mac App Store for 29 bucks! That kind of scared me at first due to being a large 3.74 GB download. Downloading and installing an operating system from the internet is not so mainstream. You can get Ubuntu my favorite Linux distribution but it’s under a gigabyte and you have to burn it to a disk.

With Lion, you buy it in the Mac App Store on Snow Leopard, and it downloads an “Install Mac OS X Lion.app”, which self destructs after Lion is installed. So if you don’t want to redownload it, make sure you back it up before installing Lion. I copied it over the network to my other Mac mini(Mid 2007), to install later on without another big 1-2 hour download. It took about 10 minutes to copy it, but this is good for people who has more than 1 Mac, and might have a bandwidth cap or impatient(like myself). Lion installs it self, without the need to burn a disk. Most full operating system downloads requires you to burn a disk.

The Install Mac OS X Lion guides you through a small wizard to prepare your Mac to install Lion.

Then it requires you to agree to the EULA that no one ever reads(I hope I didn’t agree to give up my first born or be a Human CentiPad), and then select the disk you want to install Lion to.

Dead and Dying Formats

July 12, 2011 / Kevin / 0 Comments

The Apple iMac was one of the first computers to not include a floppy drive, and it used a CD drive. Current Macs you buy today has a CD/DVD SuperDrive, except the Air. No Macs has Blu-Ray. I think CD, DVD and Blu-ray are dead as the internet will replace them.

A iPad can’t watch a Blu-ray, nor can it run Flash or Java in the browser. So I think it shows both formats are dead. A iPad can’t have a disk drive, due to space limits. It can’t have Flash or Java due to poor performance and not being open. Most people will agree Flash isn’t open, but your like “Isn’t Java open”? I thought it was also, till I read this. People, Companies and the media don’t really care that the iPad can’t play disks, but they do seem to care about the Flash issue. You have lots of ways to get good content on to your iPad, buy them on iTunes. Watch lots of free and high quality content on YouTube like Smosh or DamonFizzy. Subscribe to a free Podcast on iTunes like Hak5 or Diggnation.

Flash isn’t open because i have to buy expensive authoring tools from Adobe, for example Flash Professional is 699 bucks! With HTML5, I can write my code in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac, which is free with your operating system. I can download or buy authoring tools. I can get Notepad++, a really nice code editor which supports several programming languages I use, and its free! I can even buy HTML5 tools from Adobe if I wanted to, they sell Dreamweaver. Other tools exist to help me write HTML5 apps. Like jQuery, CSSEdit or others. Continue reading

How I got into programming

July 6, 2011 / Kevin / 0 Comments

It started back in the sixth grade. I really wanted to get into programming and creating websites. I would find free web hosts. I had a site up, a few days later my site disappeared. All It had been embedded games. So I went to the main hosting site and it was gone also! Then I found another free host which had a nice web based editor. I made the site I had on the other host, again from scratch. I didn’t know about backing up back then. So once I had the site created again, the next day at school I told some classmates about it. It was a sub domain. I told them the web address. Some of them mistyped the address. It took them to an adult site, I didn’t even know about it. So I never really liked free hosting, and I don’t think I will. Sub domains are really ugly and not full control over my site is also not a good thing.

I wanted to learn more about coding, the free website builders seemed like it lacked features. So I thought maybe if I learn how to code, I could do more, and it was true. Html seemed very basic and a good starting point. I went to the library and got a few html books. I flipped around and got to the forms section then I wanted to create a version of Office for the web. I was going to use a text area, I didn’t know about rich text JavaScript editors for the document area. Also this was before I seen web based office programs. Continue reading

Looking at Google+

July 3, 2011 / Kevin / 3 Comments

I just got my Google+ invite, after being sent five. One finally worked!

So once an invite works, it will ask for your name, gender and stuff. Then it will bring you to a page to complete your profile, some videos about it.

Okay. I’m kidding. It’s not using the same color scheme as Facebook. But you can make Google+ look like Facebook using a User Style at http://userstyles.org/styles/50051/google-facebook

Theres the real home page, for real. I kinda think I liked the Facebook color scheme better, but doesn’t mean I like Facebook social network. Continue reading

Kevin Whitman's Blog

Month: July 2011

5 WordPress Plugins I use

Completely Uninstall Mac Apps

LSL Serving Robot Tutorial – Part 2

LSL Serving Robot Tutorial – Part 1

A look at Lion

Dead and Dying Formats

How I got into programming

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