Archive for the 'Geek Tips' Category

Wordpress 2.5 upgrade with dreamhost (if your using K2 theme)

Published
by
Buzzinh
on April 16, 2008
in Geek Tips
. 4 Comments

I have also fallen foul as have many to the Latest Wordpress Upgrade, Ver 2.5.

I “One Click” installed the upgrade on the dreamhost control panel and boom 5ish mins later received an email saying upgrade complete. Checked the blog (with fear the theme was screwed as heard rumors elsewhere about 2.5 doing weird things) and all was fine! FEW…. or so i thought..
I went to login to have a look at the “New Improved” admin interface to find that i couldnt… I received…..
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /home/.zig/buzzinh/geekfreak.co.uk/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 31
I then pooed myself then got to looking for some help… and found this site / post written by a guy called Tom Rafety.

http://www.tomrafteryit.net/fatal-error-call-to-undefined-function-wp_register_sidebar_widget-in/

I followed the steps and managed to get into the admin interface for Wordpress 2.5. But i am still getting weird code above the header and not being fluent in PHP like i would like to be i have few options…Look for a Wordpress 2.5 version of K2 (will later) or change the theme… which i don’t want to do!

If anyone has any ideas / knowlege of php send me an email. buzzinh [at] geekfreak dot co dot uk

Tip of the year!!!

Published
by
Buzzinh
on March 22, 2008
in Asus eee PC and Geek Tips
. 0 Comments

Turn on and leave on your bluethooth and buy a 100m bluetooth dongle for your eee!!! I used it to locate my girlfriends phone at her college.

She called me @ 5:40 pm well after everyone had left college saying she could not find her phone. I went to her’s looked there in her car using the eee constanly scanning on blue tooth for her phone….

We went for a drive back to her college and for some reason the main doors were still open. We went inside and walked towards the last place she had it whilst i was still scaning on my eee. We got the the room it was in darkness and locked and my eee had put its self to sleep…. we turned around and someone was walking towards us… looked like a care taker so whe asked him if we could have  alook in the room to see if it was in there… i woke up my eee and he let us in.. hit scan and glanced away for a second to look to see if her phone was on the floor…. it wasnt that i could see then i glanced down at the eee and here phone bluetooth name was on the screen next to mine! She ran over to a chair with an A3 piece of paper on it, lifted the paper and there was her phone!

Moral of this storey…. attach your phone to you! Never forget the feeling of loosing it and you will take more care of it…. BUY a bluetooth dongle for your eee!!!

This is the one i have… works best with XP… plug it in XP picks it up and off you go… no drivers or software needed you can just use built in XP software.

100m BT usb

Create an MSI for Media Player Classic deployment

Published
by
Buzzinh
on January 9, 2008
in Geek Tips
. 2 Comments

Easily create an MSI for the popular Media Player Classic for deployment. 

Basics for those who don’t know!

MSI = Microsoft Installer package that can be deployed in a network enviroment.
MediaPlayerClassic = Popular media player based on the origional media player packaged with windows… its capable of playin all sorts of differning media types and also handily dvds…!!

So whilst creating some MSIs’ for work at work… I realised that none of the staff/teacher laptops had dvd software and we don’t have any site licenses for any software so i thought ok why not use MediaPlayerClassic!?

So I downloaded it and then thought… “ahh…. I have to install it on 160+ laptops…. erm…yea im not getting them out one by one and installing it on them” lol

So i went about creating an MSI with WinInstall LE. I ran the discovery (disco32.exe) which took a snapshot of the OS, then created a folder (c:\Program Files\MediaPlayerClassic), copied the mplayer classic exe into that directory and then ran disco32.exe again.

After a minute or so i had an MSI created ready for deployment… Usually we leave deployment of MSI’s until a time where no teaching is going on and teachers don’t need their laptops to turn boot speedy but as it was 2mb so is was not an issue. I added it to the “Laptops” gpo and thats it!

So if your looking for a way of allowing your users (If your IT admin/techies) to play dvds on their machines… do this its simple fast, very effective and easy to use for the less techie of us!!!

If you would like a copy of MediaPlayerClassic go here and if you want to read up on how beefy MediaPlayerClassic really is check out the wiki

MediaPlayerClassic