fuzzylizard

Here’s wishing everyone a Happy New Year! I hope 2005 brings everyone health, knowledge, prosperity and growth.

There is a very strange bug in WordPress that may prevent people from loging in. I just experienced this little bug. I cleared the cookies and cache on my web browser and found that I could not log into WordPress anymore. Apparently this bug only strikes if you move WordPress. Unfortunetaly, I just recently did this when I changed hosting companies. A little browsing on the WordPress support forum found a link that seems to have solved the problem. The change I had to make was to manually reset all the passwords through phpmyadmin. I tried this several times, but apparently WordPress uses md5 encrypted passwords instead of the default password encryption available in MySQL. I tried to reset my password using the password function available in MySQL. This did not work.

If you are experiencing the same problem, here are few links that I found helpful:

• How to change your password using phpmyadmin.
• An excellent set of tutorials and topics for WordPress users
• Support forum thread related to not being able to login
• A second thread related to login/password problems

The short solution is to manually reset the password in MySQL using phpmyadmin and md5 encryption.

Three days ago, my wife and my mom were talking about how we needed to get a two bedroom apartment so that I could have an office. This would make life a lot easier for working and finishing school. Today, as we are leaving our building, we meet the superintendent in the front lobby. On a whim, Danielle asked how much the vacant two bedroom was going for.

The result, we have now given in our application for the vacant apartment. We could be moving in just over a month. Moving!!! Something we had not thought about doing for several years. At a minimum, not until I started doing my Masters. And now we could be moving in 33 days.

Every once in a while, life gives you opportunities that you can not afford not to take. All you need to do is recognize them. This is one of those.

The difference between what we pay now for rent and the rent on the new apartment is about $42.00/month. In a city where most two bedroom apartments go for over $1000/month and a good size apartment is $1200/month, this is a steal.

The application is in, the deposit has been paid, and all we have to do is wait. Wish us luck.

Here is a little silliness for Christmas. This article lists different ways you can impress your peers with your witty party talk about design patterns. And I always thought parties where for talking about things other than work :-p. Oh well, I guess once a geek, always a geek.

Actually, if you read the article, it does have some really good information on how to deal with different design patterns and how to deal with different problems when using those design patterns. Once example is how to deal with concurrent usage problems within a singleton.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!!!

I will be away for the next little while enjoying this wonderful holiday with my family, hopefully you are doing the same.

Since I have a little downtime at work this week, I have decided to try and learn Hibernate. So far it isn’t going all that well.

“Hibernate is a powerful, ultra-high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java. Hibernate lets you develop persistent classes following common Java idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework.”

The documentation contains a quick start guide that shows you to use Hibernate with Tomcat and a servlet. However, all the tutorial includes in the bare minimum of code that pertains directly to Hibernate. This means that you need to create the servlet and fill in a lot of holes. And my little application has a lot of holes in it.

From my cursory look at the documentation, working with Hibernate looks a lot easier than working with Entity Beans or rolling my own ORM layer. I am just hoping that I can get it all up and running. Once I do, I may post an addendum to the quickstart tutorial in the Hibernate docs that fills in a lot of the wholes for new developers.

About a year ago I bought Neverwinter Nights to play through. I never even made it through the first district before giving up on the game. I had just finished playing Dungeon Seige, a much faster and more linear game, and was not expecting or looking for the slower pace of Neverwinter. As such, I abandoned the game.

However, recently I decided to give it another try. I was looking around for a new game to play and at the same time I had a friend mention that they had started to play Neverwinter Nights. So I reloaded the game onto my computer and have been playing it ever since.

I have completed the first district in the city of Neverwinter and have found the first creature. I am not sure what that says of my progress through the game, but if you have played NWN before, it will at least tell you where I currently am in the game.

I am still trying to figure things out, but so far this second attempt has gone a lot better then the first. I realize that there is a lot more to this game then I first gave it credit for.

All in all, I’m hooked. Anyone have any pointers for a first time player?