Well well, what a bloody farce! Upgrade to AVG Internet Security (the business version) and ICQ stops working… if you’re having problems with ICQ being unable to connect (the incredibly informative ‘Oops, something went wrong’ message), read on. (more…)

Version 0.1 of BOMScan has just been released. BOMScan is a little tool I wrote to scan files for Unicode Byte Order Markers (or BOMs).
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Following the report of an issue with the Advanced Custom Field Widget, I’ve released version 0.5.

The problem was that under certain circumstances, the widget failed to display the information linked to a particular page. It was caused by other widgets using the $post variables. Thanks to James Collins for highlighting this after he put the widget below the recent posts widget and found it didn’t display anything.

Get the latest version here or upgrade it automatically using the plugin manager.

Well, what a fiasco that was… my first plugin and I release it unfinished!

Apologies to anyone who has downloaded it and is now using it, but version 0.3 had a couple of issues that I desperately wanted to fix.
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I have finally gotten around to getting my beefed up version of Scott Wallick’s Custom Field Widget published on WordPress.org.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-custom-field-widget/.

But I just noticed that I haven’t sorted the translation code out! DOH!!! So, if you download it and expect it to be capable of being localised, I’m afraid it’s not at the moment. I’ll see if I can get it sorted this week.

I posted a little tweak for vBulletin back in November. Since then, vBulletin 3.8.1 has been released and the fix needs to be applied at around line 588 of the specified file, not 558 as specified in the original post.

If you want to hide a group of smilies (or an individual smilie), this fix will allow you to do so by settings it’s display order to 0. Old posts can still use it and theoretically, so can the users… they just won’t be able to see it from the main menu.

For full details, check out the original post (a link to it is in the menu).

What a revelation this is… Google SketchUp is amazing! As I’ve been writing some articles about LittleBigPlanet and the mechanics it supports, I’ve been wanting a means to draw some of the designs. Having checked out the most common open source CAD packages, I was sadly disappointed. Then I recalled hearing about SketchUp and decided to check it out.

I was up and running, and drawing some (for my first efforts) not bad diagrams to illustrate my articles.

Check out this page to see whats possible in around 20 minutes with SketchUp. On all the other applications I tried I couldn’t even draw a line! So, if you want a nice easy to use means of doing some CAD type work, give SketchUp a try.

If you’re a vBulletin administrator (like me) and you want to stop people from using older smilies, here’s a quick tweak that seems to stop them being used in the post editor.
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Just thought I’d make a quick mention about this issue to try and help someone else being bitten in the ass by it.
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Yes, thats right… my first ever slice of cake… not the yummy kind… the framework kind, and I have to say I’m impressed. I have this madly simple idea for a neat website, but I don’t want to commit weeks of work to it only to watch it crash and burn (potentially). So I’ve been looking around for frameworks for developing web apps… looked at Ruby on Rails… nice, but needed what seemed like an inordinate amount of effort to set up… then I came across CakePHP. What a revelation. (more…)