Michael's Tech Blog

Yesterday we came back from our four days holiday in London. We had amazing time. Big Ben, The Houses Of Parliament, London Eye, Tower Bridge … We walked by morning London and saw Buckingham palace without crowd surrounded it. The St James park is also amazing in the morning time.

The weather was nice – it was sunny for two days and just a bit raining in the third day of our holiday. We took a bus excursion around city center and boated by Thames. And walked, walked and walked. We’re tired a bit but we got a lot of impressions. Sure, we make a lot of shots. I need a time to process them and upload to web.

After a few days booting my home PC with errors in the filesystem I decided to do a big re-installation. Currently I have two HDDs: one with Windows XP and another – with Kubuntu 7.04 and LinuxMCE 0704. The hard drive with Kubuntu is too old and it has some bad blocks. So, I bought a new HDD and scheduled on next Saturday re-install everything to have fresh, working systems. Windows XP will be installed on the same hard drive it presents now. On the new HDD I decided to install Kubuntu 7.10 and then LinuxMCE 0710 from CDs when its stable version will be released. Well, big plans. Let’s see how it will be done.

Today I moved my blog to the latest version of WordPress 2.3.1. I was afraid a bit to do that immediately right after release. Because the 2.3.1 includes a native support of tags. But I, as many other bloggers, used plug-in “Ultimate Tag Warrior”. So, I’d like to have some tool to import them. I red that post written by Leonid Mamchenkov and decided to upgrade at least my personal blog and see how it’ll be.

Except a few small problems related with out of date plug-ins everything was fine. WP script imported my old tags and linked them with posts. At the first view it was done correctly. If you’ll see something strange or get some error, please, contact me. I’ll be very appreciated for any bug-reports.

Finally, I got my yearly vacations! Next two weeks I and Maria are going to take a rest in St. Petersburg, Russia. That year was extremely hard for both work and private life. So, we merited a good relaxation! Hope I’ll be a chance to take some nice photos. I’ll share them via our Picasa album. So, stay tune!

I moved to the new hosting last week. It was difficult a bit because the hosting has a good graphical interface but extremely pure shell. I prefer do everything related with my blogs via shell because it’s much faster than GUI. But in that case I spent some time to dump my database back (via GUI it took a lot of time with my home connection).
Anyway, now the blog id up and ready to tell you about interesting things.

Recently I upgraded my WordPress blog up to 2.1.3. Right after that I decided to change its theme. I spent many hours to look at newest WordPress themes. Then I tried to apply some interesting ones to my blog. Finally, I chose this theme. It looks nice, clear and modern. So, I moved all customizations from the previous one and I hope it works correctly.

Last week I upgraded all my blogs to WordPress 2.1.3 (this one was 1.5 ). It took just ten minutes per blog. I followed by WordPress upgrade guide. There was only a few small problems related with some old plugins. After downloaded and installed new versions of them the problems were resolved.
I’d like to say thanks to WordPress team for the excellent software! Good work, guys!