Go here and follow the instructions to install just IE9: (the command I used was

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="9" bash

)

At home (where I had an average dl speed of 340Kb/s) this took 4 hours. It was something like 10 minutes at work where I was downloading at 4Mb/s.

The VM will expire in 30 days, but you can easily reset to a clean snapshot of the VM from before its deactivation counter started. It comes with Firefox already installed, so you don’t even have to install a new browser!

One thing to watch out for: by default there are no audio drivers installed. In VitualBox, open up the audio options for the VM and turn audio on, then select the correct drivers and hardware. For me, this was the ALSA drivers and the Intel HD hardware. You’ll just have to figure this one out by trial and error.

To do so, change the audio settings, start the VM, and see if windows automatically finds and installs the drivers for audio. If it doesn’t, close and keep trying different combinations until it does. Once the VM has the drivers installed, you need to make sure the audio works well ¹. Just go to youtube and play any video. If the sound quality isn’t where you’d want it to be for watching a whole movie or tv show, repeat the previous steps until you find a combination that gives you the desired results.

And now we have oh so sweet Netflix instant on Ubuntu without needing to give Windows the two partitions it demands of our hard drives.

But the transient wouldn’t set. No matter what, I’d hit my breakpoints inside the ‘if not set’ code block.

Well, as it turns out, if you set an expiration time, WordPress will also set a secondary transient option: _transient_timeout_{$transient_key}. That’s a lot of extra characters padding the left side of that option name! 19, in fact.

So with only 64 characters allowed in the option_name column of wp_options to begin with, you need to limit your transient names to 45 characters or fewer. In my case, the api key I was working with was 36 characters, which left me just 9 characters with which to uniquely prefix my transient.

I had 17.

Oops.

If you’ve ever had to install it as a network activated plugin on a multisite installation (especially one with more than just a few sites), you probably thought about ditching the plugin altogether.

At work, I’m in the process of building a multisite installation that will consist of more than a dozen sites and they need this plugin. Being the lazy coder I am, I came up with this quick script to force TinyMCE Advanced to use site-wide options rather than options on a per-site basis.

Note: this only works if both this plugin and TinyMCE Advanced are network activated.

Also, this does not stop WordPress from also saving the settings to each site, so if you change your mind later there’s no cost to turning my plugin off.

Hide field from logged in users
Hide field from logged out users

This will work as-is if you use it as a mu-plugin, or as a regular plugin if you add plugin headers to it.

I’ve been getting significantly frustrated with Ubuntu since upgrading to 11.10. It seems to be getting too bloated for my needs. What’s more frightening is that it’s starting to do too much without my input and (sometimes) against my wishes.

The things I’m talking about are very minor and I’ll get into them below, but the direction is what’s worrying.

First, the fact that I can’t remove the workspace switcher from the launcher bugs me to no end. I was using workspaces before Ubuntu shipped with Compiz and have a keyboard shortcut in place. A workspace switcher button in launcher, for me, is more useless than a recursive flag for pwd.

Second, Ubuntu no longer needs me to authenticate to do upgrades any more. So I don’t need administrative access to modify core files? Oh, it still requires a sudo command in the CLI, but not the GUI? Great… Seems too much like windows to me.

There are a few more things I’ve noticed (like disabling the themes I had installed), but won’t get into them here.

It seems to me that they’re pursuing non-technical users more with each release. Which is great, since it will help personal computing in general. But it seems to no longer be a distribution that will most effectively serve my needs.

I’m really happy to see Ubuntu becoming more mainstream. My wife doesn’t have many problems using it, and most of the ones she does have are just out of her ignorance my lack of actively educating her on the subject. ¹

This actually brings up the reason I won’t be leaving Ubuntu (at least not until I get a new laptop). It is far more important to me to wean my household off of Windows ² than it is to have a more “pure” distro on my computer.

WordCamp San Francisco was a hugely inspirational event for me. First of all, actually getting to meet so much of the community in real life was unreal. Many of the people I met I’d interacted with on Twitter or elsewhere online. Most I’d never interacted with at all. I’d never been around so many people who share my passion for WordPress. It was positively infectious.

More than anything, I think this WordCamp was a celebration of the ascendancy of WordPress. There was certainly a sense of it the whole weekend (I thought so, anyway), and the statistics in Matt Mullenweg’s keynote support the idea.

WordPress is coming out as a viable enterprise solution. Plenty of people have speculated about what’s next for WordPress; I’ve heard theme shops, marketplaces, premium plugins, and more. What I haven’t heard is Enterprise.

I’m not talking about a blog. I’m talking about WordPress as an enterprise CMS, even without a blog component at all. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of this starting in the next twelve months.

Mitcho Erlewine gave a great talk on this topic; the point he stressed was that we can do this, we can do it better, and we can do it now. So what are we waiting for? ¹

Aside from the overall feel of the weekend, I have a few more thoughts on the whole weekend.

Holy crap, the WordPress community is AMAZING. There are so many amazing people doing so many amazing things with this platform. For example, the stuff that Dan Milward is doing with WordPress blows my mind ².

It’s all about the people. The talks were amazing, but the times when I was just hanging out talking to people were the really valuable moments. Getting to connect with that many people and share my passion with them, and experience their passion–that was the coolest thing about WordCamp San Francisco.

Ok, I lied a little bit, my absolute favorite part of WCSF wasn’t talking with other people (in general), though that is way way up there.

My real absolute favorite moment of the whole of WordCamp San Francisco was meeting Ptah Dunbar. We were sitting next to each other in the tech track on Friday (I think it was during the lightning talks); he introduced himself and I immediately recognized his name. I mean, who wouldn’t? I introduced myself and he knew my name, which I found very surprising. I said I was sure he must have seen me on twitter, then; he thought for a moment, and said “No, I’ve seen you on Trac.”

Blew me away. Someone I look up to in the community who lives nowhere near me knew me from my contributions to the community.

Made my whole weekend.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on WordCamp San Francisco. I can’t wait for my next chance to geek out with people at that level again.