I was called in at 9 this morning for some routine maintenance and an upgrade or two of the computer that Just Works.

Mac Don’t Always Just Work

I started at 9:20am – faced with the 2-year-or-so old Intel Mac Book Pro that was still running OS X Common House Cat Tiger and in desperate need of an upgrade.

The machine was previously used as a photo bank / work horse and was now relegated to the serene pastures of office admin.  The 120GiB harddrive was 100GiB full, and would therefore need a good vacuuming.

Still littering the office from previous Mac upgrades, which didn’t go smoothly at all, I had my 2-step upgrade discs handy.  I’ve read several posts where people have said upgrading from Tiger straight to OS X Snow Leopard was possible, but my mileage varied quite considerably.

So with all 5 or 6 of the various ages of Mac I had to upgrade in the office about 3 months ago, I had to go from Tiger to Leopard to Snow Leopard every time. Not. Fun. At. All.

Bring in the Leopards

Anyhow, the files on this computer had all been backed up, so I could just fire away. I duly slipped the OS X Leopard 10.5 disc into the drive.  The Mac recognised the disc easily enough and a couple of clicks later the disc was humming along nicely and Leopard was being installed.

About 25 minutes later as the progress bar neared 100%, I was thinking to myself how smoothly it was all going. Of course, thoughts like this generates a ridiculously strong electro magnetic pulse, and mere moments after forming this thought in my head, the Mac threw up a non-helpful message to the tune of “Leopard could not be installed on this system. Please restart and try again”.

Luckily the message said please, otherwise I would have been seriously pissed off at just having wasted 30 minutes.

But the fun was just starting. Restarting the iMac it then told me that OS X 10.4 was required for this installation and that OS X 10.4 was not detected on this system. I chose the main drive as the startup disc and restarted the Mac again.

This time it try to boot, but just shut down. I tried a couple of times, but it did the same thing and eventually I realised the harddrive must have gotten wrecked.

How to the get CD out of a Mac that doesn’t boot up

Hit the power button and immediately hold down the mouse button (on the trackpad). After a while the disc will eject.

How to then boot again from the CD of a Mac that doesn’t boot up

Power up the Mac, slip in the CD, hold down the C key.

Eventually I used a retail disc of OS X Leopard to go into Disc Utilities and check the harddrive for errors.

“Oh”, said the Mac, “the disc needs to be repaired”. Wow really? That just works.

I clicked on the Repair button and several more wasted minutes later it apparently didn’t just work as I was told “your disc can’t be repaired. Save as much info as you can and reformat.” Nice one, Apple.

So that’s what I did. I reformatted and started from scratch by running the OS X Leopard 10.5 retail install.  After about 30 minutes of that, I treated myself to an immediate additional 25 minutes by upgrading straight to OS X Snow Leopard 10.6. I was up for even more and thought about immediately installing the patches to bring it up to 10.6.4, but the 900MiB download and a slow Internet connection in the office quickly killed off that idea.

Apple Macs Just Work – Eventually

So at 13:00, the Apple Mac finally just worked.

And the crash, which resulted in the loss of all the installed applications with their files, means that the office is now a superbly uncluttered admin workhorse richer.

For me a major WordPress Blog annoyance is the WordPress Revisions feature. It essentially saves a copy of your post or page every time you update it. If you share my frustration, here’s how to stop or limit WordPress Revisions and clean current revisions from your database.

Remember kids: Backup before you try this at home

WordPress is an awesome blogging platform with many useful features, but WordPress Revisions is the one feature I have never said about “oh, wow, I wish I had the previous iteration of this article“.  I back my database up regularly (and so should you), which gives me a backup of my article anyway, so for me it makes sense to disable WordPress Revisions all together.

There are various plug-ins that can handle this for you, and I recommend that you use one of them if you’re not comfortable fiddling around in code.

Otherwise, open your wp-config.php file, which resides in your WordPress root/install directory, and add either one of the following lines before the ?> at the bottom of the file.

To totally disable WordPress Revisions to prevent additional copies of posts and pages being saved, add this:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', FALSE);

To limit WordPress Revisions to say 1, 2 or 3 revision copies only, add this and change the number to suit your preference:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 2);

The following line of code will erase all the WordPress Revisions in your blog. I did this, because I don’t want any copies anywhere – it reduced my 7.4MiB database to 3.2MiB, which just shows how much space WordPress Revisions can occupy (and this is a development database, which means it’s still relatively small).

Do you really want to delete all your WordPress Revisions?

Open you favourite MySQL interface software (commandline, PHPMyAdmin, MySQL Workbench – they all work), back up your current database and then enter the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

Your database will now be wiped clean of every single WordPress Revision (but obviously not your actual article or pages). In any case, please take my my advice: back up your database.

And… you’re done!  You should now have a significantly smaller WordPress database, which will speed things up a bit – it really makes a different if your blog is huge, less so if you only have a few entries.

Happy blogging!

Ever since I switched 1EarthAdventures to WordPress way back when… erm *flipsthroughblog*, on 15 October 2005 or not too long after, I’ve been using this awesome Illacrimo Theme from Design Disease.

However, this is 2010 and my blog has evolved from a Twilight-esque, emo diary in to a blog where some of the posts are actually helpful enough to be linked to and read quite often.

So, I think it’s time for a new theme.

Although I’m not an expert yet, I have dabbled quite extensively in WordPress theme modification, most notably SabahBah.com – which was an extensive project with custom theme and custom plugins *patonmyback*.

I’ve also adapted a Blogger blog to be emulated by a WordPress install, as well as adapting a RapidWeaver theme and blog to work in a WordPress install.

Quick and easy, it was not.

But alas, today marks the first day of Project Fiddle, of which the achieved mission will be a brand new shiny theme for 1EarthAdventures.com.

Let the work begin…

I just deleted and old Ubuntu off the Journo’s dual-boot Ubuntu/XP HP Pavillion and along with it Ubuntu’s Grub and her Master Boot Record (MBR), which of course rendered the machine useless.

I had an Ubuntu 10.04 Lycid Lynx Live CD at hand (never leave home without it), so here’s how to repair an XP MBR with only an Ubuntu Live CD.

Repairing XP MBR with Ubuntu Live DC

It’s actually ridiculously easy:

1. Boot from the Live CD and into Ubuntu (it’s option 1, Try Ubuntu Without Making Any Changes to your Computer);
2. Once you’re in the OS, from the menu choose Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal;
3. In the Terminal Window type “sudo apt-get install lilo“, which is a Linux gadget that will fix your woes;
   It downloaded, then gave me a prompt box which required me to hit enter before it installed Lilo.  There were some warnings telling me to do something otherwise the computer might not work. The computer wasn’t working anyway, so I ignored those warnings and…
4. type “sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr“;
5. Done. Reboot.

The above assumes a straight forward flub with the Master Boot Record and a default setup as far as harddrives go.

I rebooted the PC and voila! it booted straight back in to Windows XP.

Fresh off several failed attempts to make OpenERP work on Ubuntu Sever 9.10, I’m hungry to make something work and so I’m diving straight into installing OpenBravo on Ubuntu Server 9.10.

12.28pm For the sake of starting afresh I’m reinstalling Ubuntu Server 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and then I’ll follow this Installing OpenBravo ERP on Ubunu tutorial.

1:10pm A quick edit of /etc/apt/sources.list to un-comment (remove the # at the start fthe partner repositories from where OpenBravo EPR will be downloaded:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu karmic partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu karmic partner

Then just type the next few commands to update the repositories and install OpenBravo ERP.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install openbravo-erp

It needs to download a staggering 216MB of archives and will then use a whopping 1.3GB of additional disk space.  O dear, here comes a 2 -3 hour download.  Time for lunch.

2.35pm It seems the bulk of the download is done and it’s busy pulling the OpenBravo files down very quickly indeed. Malaysian mirror perhaps?

3.00pm Download seems complete and loads of info notices are flying across the Terminal window as it’s installing and configuring all sorts of stuff.

3.14pm It seems to be done and the message in the terminal window tells me “Installation is now complete! To access your Openbravo instance, please point your browser to http://ip_address/openbravo“. That all seems suspiciously easy.

3.15pm Oh. My. God. It works!!  Now I’m totally unprepared.

I read a lot about OpenERP thinking I’d get that to work and now I have to go on another learning binge to get to know OpenBravo ERP.  I can’t believe that install was so easy.

Time to explore…