Month: December 2005

Zee Garden

This is the second little cluster of Pohutakawa flowers that I’ve seen… it’s just the first I’ve taken pictures of because it’s one of the trees by the house, rather than one in the middle of the garden.
PohutakawaFerntangle
And this is one of the many ferns in the garden.

Chip, Chip, Chipping Away

Sometimes my mailbox fills up with an unmanagable amount of stuff.

(Usually, I archive mail as I deal with it)

Turns out that I have mail going back as far as August (!)

If you have issues that you’ve either emailled me about, or commented on my blog about; let me know (: I’ve been emailling here and there; and hope to get through it all in the next few days or week or thereabouts, but I still manage to forget about things sometimes.

(In other news, I’ve added a page for themes and other bits and pieces that use UTW. If you have a thing that belongs there, let me know. I’ve got the things that I see in my referrer logs; but there are bound to be other things.)

A new experience for me: Being an Irate Customer

I have a camera.

(I have an insidious number of cameras [1 cardboard-box pinhole camera, 2 digital cameras, 3 SLR’s, and 3/4 of a camera that this story is about]. Insidious. This is a story about my 3/4 camera… The most insidious camera of them all!)

I guess the 3/4 camera isn’t really a camera at all, on account of the missing 1/4.

One day, it will be a Mamiya RB67 Pro-S.

Today, it’s a lens, a body and a viewfinder; and not much use for anything.

In a slightly more ideal world, there would also be a back.

But there isn’t.

Photo and Video International had a back for sale on their website. So I enquired, was this back they had a 120 back*? And the answer was yes!

And so I ordered the 120 back! (err… this was back on November 17th. This is a fairly long story)

Several days later, a courier brought me a package! With glee I opened the package; but alas, my glee turned to sadness. The back that was sent was a polaroid back*; and one that I’m pretty sure I’d need an adapter to even use on my camera.

So off to the post office I went with the wrong back and sent it back, from whence it came. And with the aid of modern courier tracking technology, I saw that it arrived on November 26th.

And time passed.

And time passed.

And time passed.

And then it was yesterday.

I was kinda wondering where my 120 back had gotten to.

And so I asked when I could expect my 120 back. And I was told that they’d send it once they recieved the incorrect back that they’d sent me.

!

(That would be the incorrect back that they’d recieved on the 26th of November. Ten days prior. Thank you modern courier tracking technology!)

And so I told them that they already had the incorrect back! And I showed them the wonder of modern courier tracking technology!…And the person I was dealing with went to confirm with someone else whether it had arrived…

And then didn’t bother getting in touch with me for the rest of the day.

I didn’t actually hear anything until *I* chased them up this morning.

And when I chased them up this morning…It turns out they don’t even *have* a 120 back. Apparently “according to our second hand database we had one, but it looks as though it was sold and not removed”.

In the process of *not* buying a back for my 3/4 of a camera; these idiots have told me that they had a piece of equipment for sale that they don’t have, sent me the wrong piece of equipment, didn’t process the piece of equipment that I returned for over a week; and on top of that, once they knew that the piece of equipment was returned much earlier (which was before lunch time); they couldn’t even manage to let me know what was happening with it that afternoon; and I only found out about it when I asked the next day!

The thing that really fucks me off; is that if they’d told me that they didn’t have the 120 back, back in November when I ordered it; I’d probably have had enough time to get one from somewhere like Keh, this side of Christmas. Now, three weeks out, at peak parcel time; the chances are going to be slim to nil.

In conclusion: If you’re looking to buy secondhand photo equipment; don’t even consider Photo and Video International. They’re a useless pack of idiots; who didn’t get any more useful in the face of a string of mistakes at their end.

*120 is a kind of film. 220 is like 120, but longer so you get more pictures on a roll, but only comes in about three flavours (I do darkroom stuff… there’s almost nothing available in 220 that’s appropriate for that). Other backs use polaroid film which costs about a squillion dollars per picture.

Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.8.9.spaghetti

(Whoops. I must’ve forgotten to increment the version number last time around.)

There’s an updated version!

– There’s a new predefined format that includes a Technorati icon at the start of the list (as requested). It’s called technoraticommalistwithiconlabel (: (As compared to the technoraticommalistwithlabel, which is the text version)
– There’s also one for invisible tags! It’s waaay down the list (right above the post ones.)
– Tags are no longer automatically included on ‘page’ posts (but if you have wrangled your wordpress so that you can tag ’em, they’ll still display when present)
– I fixed the <? and <?= shortcuts that were causing people grief (something I should have done aaages ago..)
– I’ve made two downloads: one compatible with wordpress up to version 1.6ish; the other 2.0 RC1 and beyondish (Just a difference between the rewrite rules.)
– I’m pretty sure I fixed the display issue with Opera, K2 and single tag posts

Download for WordPress 2.0 RC1ish is here:
http://www.neato.co.nz/plugins/ultimate-tag-warrior-2-8-9-wp-2.zip
Download for up to WordPress 1.5ish/1.6ish is here:
http://www.neato.co.nz/plugins/ultimate-tag-warrior-2-8-9-wp-15.zip
Support forum is here: http://www.neato.co.nz/forum
Tired person is: at the keyboard…

Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.8.9

Mostly, just an update to properly supports URL rewriting stuff in WordPress 2.0 RC1

* Caveat: In retrospect, I’m not sure how well I tested it with pre-2.0 RC1 (I’m pretty sure I didn’t regenerate the .htaccess file; so it may just be working with the old rewrite rules); so if it breaks, I’m not suprised, but let me know anyway!

* Yeah… it is broken for earlier wordpress

For those of you who are getting a 404 page when clicking on a tag, I figured out what’s wrong. Perhaps this is an Apache version/setting thing, but in the RewriteRule lines for UTW (RewriteRule ^tags/…), wherever you see a $matches[1], $matches[2], etc. replace them with just $1, $2, etc. This fixed it for me.
— Cully Larson

Download here | Support forum

WordPress 2.0-RC1, Plugins and URL Rewriting

We fear change

My beloved WordPress plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior uses URL rewriting to make the good stuff happen. In the 2.0-RC1 release of WordPress, the way URL rewriting works has changed a great deal. What follows, is what I needed to do in order to get Ultimate Tag Warrior to work properly.

First: How Ultimate Tag Warrior worked previously
With old URL rewriting; a request for /tag/sometag would be intercepted; and turned into index.php?tag=sometag behind the scenes. Underlying PHP magic would populate the $_GET array with the value of the tag parameter; then UTW would use the value from the $_GET array to figure out taggy stuff.

Next: Why this doesn’t work anymore
Requests for /tag/sometag are now matched in WordPress code; which means that the $_GET array is no longer being populated with the name of the requested tag. This broke pretty URLs, since as far as the plugin was concerned, there wasn’t a tag being specified.

Finally: How to wrangle it so that it does work properly
There are three things that I needed to do to get UTW to play nicely.

Phase one: Make changes to my rewrite rules
Previously, my additions to the rewrite rules array looked like this:
$rules[substr($baseurl, 1) . "?(.*)$"] = "index.php?tag=$1";

I had to change them, to be like this:
$rules[substr($baseurl, 1) . "?(.*)$"] = "index.php?tag=$matches[1]";
The rewritten URLs changed from having references to $1…$n to having references to $matches[1]…$matches[n].

Phase two: Add my query variables to the list of public variables
I needed to add a new filter in order to get my little paws on the name of the current tag.

This is the filter. It just adds tag to the list of query variables.
function ultimate_query_vars($vars) {
$vars[] = 'tag';
return $vars;
}

There’s a corresponding filter hookup. This is what mine looks like; because I have most (all?) of my actions inside a class named UltimateTagWarriorActions.
add_filter('query_vars', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_query_vars'));

(For completeness; if you don’t stash your action functions in a class, it looks more like
add_filter('query_vars', 'ultimate_query_vars');)

Phase three: Use the values from the query_vars object instead of $_GET
This part of the exercise was relatively straightforward. I replaced references to $_GET["tag"] with get_query_var("tag"). Obviously, this gave me the name of the tag from the URL instead of an empty string (:

It was a pain to figure out the hoops that I needed to jump through to get this to work; so if you’re in the process of getting a pre WordPress 2.0 plugin to work, I hope that it helps.