Yann "Bug" Dubois

Here are a few books about computing science, the web industry, programming and key programming figures that I have been (re-)reading lately. I strongly recommend each of those.

I recently took a apart my Verbatim external USB 2 hard drive unit to find out what kind of hard drive and components where hosted inside. I found out a Hitachi Travelstar mini-SATA 2.5″ HDD and a nifty little mini-USB – to – SATA converter board inside a basic external drive enclosure. Here are the pictures.

Following a recent hard drive crash on my Sony VAIO VGN-NR10E laptop, I had to take it apart to change the internal HDD. I took some photographs of the tear-down process, and here is a visual step-by-step break-down guide on how to perform this hardware upgrade.

Tired of waiting forever for this single-coma change on a WordPress hierarchical page to finish saving? – Relief is coming your way. In the form of a simple plugin. Just download it, enable it, and now you can rediscover how it is like managing the content of hundred-pages CMS blogs with pretty permalinks in a few seconds instead of minutes.

Hey, did you know you could post your blog in a Facebook page and benefit from all of Facebook’s social bells and whistles without even installing a single plugin?

All you need to do is to get a free Facebook Application ID, create a Facebook “Fan page”, configure the Facebook app to grab a page from your blog, smack it onto a custom tab in the Fan page and bingo!

Let’s review in detail how this works step-by-step…

Since WordPress 2.8, a new kind of caching mechanism has been added to WordPress. it is not very well documented yet (I could not find any relevant page in the Codex. Please leave a comment if you find one).

According to this WordPress core development trac discussion, that feature has been introduced so that “non-persistent” or otherwise “short-lived” data that used to be stored in the “options” database table can be distinguished from “real options data” that is meant to be persistent (ie, live forever in the database until it is updated or erased).

I’ve just finished migrating our www.Nogent-Citoyen.com local community site to WordPress 2.8 RC1 and well… I have to say up to now everything looks great!

The site ran flawlessly right away, with its 25 plugins including Wp Super Cache, the YD Recent Posts Widget and some other quite vintage legacy plugins that I can’t do without. I had no special migration task to conduct. I even ran the site for a few hours on a staging URL without upgrading the database structure, and did not notice anything breaking.