However, some settings like blog address are held in the database which makes mirroring local development and remote production servers a little tricky. If you just backed up the database on the remote set-up and imported it to your local XAMPP server through phpMyAdmin then WordPress will still think that it is at http://www.wordpressblog.com and not http://localhost

Permalinks might not work, plugins might break and so on.

What you need to do is either edit the database, searching and replacing the relevant fields or edit the wp-config.php file to override the database settings. I don’t recommend the first option as it is error-prone and you have to do it again if you throw the database in the opposite direction.

Editing the wp-config.php file is relatively easy, just add the lines

	define('WP_SITEURL', "http://localhost");
	define('WP_HOME', "http://localhost");

but if you edit the wp-config.php file you will have two different versions of the file.  This will cause your site to break if you absent-mindedly uploaded your local wp-config.php to the remote server.  If you are using source control, like git or svn, and forget to exclude the file the same thing happens.  Plus you have to maintain two versions.

Here’s what I do. I set-up the wp-config.php to check to see if it is a local server, if it is then set the configuration one way, otherwise set it using the production values.

The first 3 settings are the same whether local or remote.  In some cases the MySQL hostname will be different, so just set it later with the others.

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpressdb');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'wpdbuser');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

We’ve moved the 4th setting, the password, because it is different. And we will add the ‘WP_SITEURL’ and ‘WP_HOME’ settings later to override the database values. But first two more settings that are the same whether local or remote.

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Ok, now the fun starts. These five lines checks to see if the server’s address is 127.0.0.1 If it is, we assume it is a local machine and set a WP_ENV to development, otherwise we set it to production.

if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=='127.0.0.1') {
	define('WP_ENV', 'development');
} else {
	define('WP_ENV', 'production');
}

Having determined whether the environment is local or remote, we then grab the site address for use with ‘WP_SITEURL’ and ‘WP_HOME’.  I don’t hardcode it in as it gives me the flexibility to re-use it for any virtual server.

$debian_server  = preg_replace ('/:.*/',"", $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']); $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

Finally in these lines, if it is the local development, we set a simple dummy password and disable post revisions. We also set WP_DEBUG to false, this allows us to set it to true if we come across any tricky problems.

If it is the real production server then we set the password to its original value which should be a long and random set of characters.

if ( WP_ENV == 'development' ) {
	define('DB_PASSWORD', 'short_dummy_password');

	define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);
	define ('WP_DEBUG', false);

	define('WP_SITEURL', "http://$debian_server");
	define('WP_HOME', "http://$debian_server");
} elseif ( WP_ENV == 'production' ) {
	define('DB_PASSWORD', 'the_real_password_which_is_a_very_long_and_random_string');
}

This wp-config.php file is now safe to be used on the remote production server or on your local development server.

One note, we didn’t set the WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME on the production server instead using the values in the database.  But if we moved a site from one domain to another we could do so.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me in the comments.

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Google at Tully's

Like we discussed at recent episodes of messa.tv, Google is trying to become #1 player of Japanese search engine market. To achieve the aim, Google is spending huge amount of money for marketing campaigns on TV and anywhere around us.

Even here at Tully’s Coffee which is one of Starbucks clones in Japan, I found a small card by Google. It says “Connect to Free Wi-Fi here to see Google’s Search Story”. Sounds nice because it’s quite hard to find free Wi-Fi spots in Japan but don’t have excessive expectations for this campaign. ONLY 30min a day you can use it!

Partner companies of this campaign are Wi-Fi provider NTT and cafes like Tully’s. I know they don’t want to open the Wi-Fi for a long time but the only 30min limit gives me a negative impression. I’m always thinking that Google can give us deep impressions all the time.

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So it’s convenient to set  up a mouse-less environment.
I know many people use [Ctrl+P][Ctrl+C][Ctrl+V] and so on.
Some people uses 「Alt＋Tab」「Ctrl＋Tab」「Windows button＋D」as well.

Today I want to show you 5 ways to set-up a mouse-less environment that aren’t as well known.

1. Go to top-right search box(when browsing like Firefox, IE)
2. Go to address area (when browsing like Firefox, IE)
3. Call up the right mouse menu without mouse
4. Make scrolling smoother
5. Enable clicking links with keyboard

1. Have a look at the screenshot below

You can move to search box with the shortcut [Ctrl+E].

And in addition, you can choose the object for search with [Ctrl+↓]
You can use this with Firefox and IE as well.

2. Have a look at the screenshot.

You can move to address bar and attach the copied URL by clicking [Ctrl＋L]
You can use with with Firefox and IE, and Chrome as well.

3, Show the context menu, so-called right click which we use a lot.

The shortcut key for this one is [Shift+F10]
With this shortcut, you will be able to change the way to show the pics,
the way to make folders and so on without mouse.

4. Enable smooth scroll with space key (like Livedoor Reader)
You can do this using a Greasemonkey script.
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/nagaton/20060831/1156993415
(Sorry for it’s in Japanese)

5.  Click links without using the mouse.
Maybe the most useful tip when browsing, to enable this functionality you need to install an extension called “mouseless browsing”
http://journal.mycom.co.jp/articles/2009/04/13/mouselessbrowsing/index.html

Try out any of the above if they interest you!  By the way, one of the main reasons why I have been using Firefox is because of the number of extensions/add-ons it has.
But last week, Google Chrome also started to open up development of extension. http://journal.mycom.co.jp/news/2009/12/09/014/?rt=na
They have already covered a wide range of must-have extensions and it is expected that the number of extensions are going to increase so quickly.
I’m looking forward to the browser battle between Firefox and Chrome heating up ;)

Oh and if you have any other tips for a mouse-less working environment, tell us about it in the comments.  Thanks!

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messa.tv has been published since April 2006, and then became an English program since beginning of 2009. But finally we’ll re-start the Japanese show!

The Japanese version of messa.tv might help you if you’re interested in Japanese tech trends, culture and business. Or if you’re studying Japanese, you can watch and learn real live Japanese!

Now our English show have lots of visitors from all around the world and a few days ago we got a guest from Greece. He said he is a fan of our show!

Chris from Greece visit us

Anyway, we’re always welcome to your feedbacks or comments on our blogs, Twitter.

See you at the show soon!

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curvycorners

This one can show beautiful rounded corners but can be a bit heavy to load each time. I’m planning to replace it with a lighter and faster one but let me describe how to use “curvyCorners”.

1. Download it form here and load it at a header area of HTML files like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="curvycorners.js"></script>

2. Next, create blocks with these class attributes:

Round top corners

<div class="myboxtop">
Round top corners. <br />
Round top corners. <br />
Round top corners. <br />
</div>

Round bottom corners

<div class="myboxbottom">
Round bottom corners. <br />
Round bottom corners. <br />
Round bottom corners. <br />
</div>

Round all corners

<div class="myboxall">
Round all corners. <br />
Round all corners. <br />
Round all corners. <br />
</div>

Then move to the js file.

3. Configure like below:

Round 10px of top corners

settingsTop = {
 tl: { radius: 10 },
 tr: { radius: 10 },
 bl: { radius: 0 },
 br: { radius: 0 },
 antiAlias: true,
 autoPad: true,
 validTags: ["div"]
}

Round 10px of bottom corners

settingsBottom = {
 tl: { radius: 0 },
 tr: { radius: 0 },
 bl: { radius: 10 },
 br: { radius: 10 },
 antiAlias: true,
 autoPad: true,
 validTags: ["div"]
}

Round 10px of all corners

settingsAll = {
 tl: { radius: 10 },
 tr: { radius: 10 },
 bl: { radius: 10 },
 br: { radius: 10 },
 antiAlias: true,
 autoPad: true,
 validTags: ["div"]
}

[Note]
tl: top left
tr: top right
bl: bottom left
br: bottom right
antiAlias: Antialias (true or false)
autoPad: Margin (true or false)
validTags: curvyCorners applied tags (separated by commas)

4. Apply for classes

      myBoxObject = new curvyCorners(settingsTop, "myboxtop");
      myBoxObject.applyCornersToAll();

      myBoxObject = new curvyCorners(settingsBottom, "myboxbottom");
      myBoxObject.applyCornersToAll();

          myBoxObject = new curvyCorners(settingsAll, "myboxall");
      myBoxObject.applyCornersToAll();

That’s all!

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See more detail here: WordBench 大阪 » Blog Archive » 2010年新年会を1月31日(日)開催

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Ken's stuck in time calendar

Our theme on the English side and the Japanese side are the same.  And by that I mean, we only have one copy of the theme files that is used for both sides.  For this to work, it has to be  fully localised and independant. One thing that is quite different in the two languages is the formatting of dates.  A date like Dec 13th 2009 might be formatted as 2009年12月13日

Chapp worked from a theme that had the date formats hard coded into the theme.  As in:

<?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?>

If we left that in, the Japanese side’s dates wouldn’t be right, but if we took out the ‘F jS, Y’ part, it defaulted to outputting the time.  As a workaround, we used:

<?php the_date(); ?>

which does fetch and use the right formatted date on both sides.  Yay! But… when WordPress generated archive pages, we found an unexpected behaviour of date().  It only outputs a certain date once.  So if two posts were written on the same day, only one post would have the date.  I think somewhere in the theme there is an ugly workaround involving an array.  But this is a better approach:

<?php the_time(get_option('date_format')); ?>

What this is doing is fetching the date format string that is set in Settings > General > Date Format and using that.  Which for the record is F jS, Y on the English side, and Y年n月j日 on the Japanese side.  I know it may sound obvious but at the time it had us scratching our collective heads.

And while not many installations will be using the same set of theme files for two or more languages at the same time (except for WordPress MU themes), localizing the theme this way lets you or your users to just set the date format in the General Settings screen.

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If anyone has a request for one of the other 41 prefectures, just leave a comment and I’ll make one when I have time.  I chose these prefectures for various random reasons.  For example, Shimane is the home to the Ruby language which is what we do most of our web development on, and Okinawa is my favourite place in Japan.

Tokyo

Aomori

Hyogo

Kyoto

Okinawa

Shimane

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There may not be easy way to load rubygems in jar files with JRuby.
But with JRuby on GAE/J, it’s easy to load.

• JRuby on Rails on GAE/J, can load rubygems in RAILS_ROOT/vendor/gems, just do require “gem-name”.
• But rubygems often contain a lot of files and that can eat into the quota pretty quickly.
• JRuby on GAE/J, can load rubygems from jar files.
• Therefore it makes sense to put rubygems into jar files, and I am going to show you how step by step.

Steps:

• install rubygems into a specific temporary directory (not into the system dir)
  • use -i option to install rugygems into a temporary directory.
  • use –no-rdoc and –no-ri options, to skip to install rdoc and ri, to reduce jar file size.
• compress rubygems by jar command in the temporary directory.
• add require “installed-gem.jar” line in RAILS_ROOT/config/environment.rb

Example (scrapi):

% cd RAILS_ROOT
% cd lib/
% jgem search -r scrapi

*** REMOTE GEMS ***

assaf-scrapi (1.2.1)
scrapi (1.2.0)
scrapin-a-livin (0.1.1)
% jgem install -i scrapi-tmp scrapi --no-rdoc --no-ri
Successfully installed tidy-1.1.2
Successfully installed scrapi-1.2.0
2 gems installed
% cd scrapi-tmp/
% ls
cache  doc  gems  specifications
% ls gems/
scrapi-1.2.0  tidy-1.1.2
% ls specifications/
scrapi-1.2.0.gemspec  tidy-1.1.2.gemspec
% jar cf ../scrapi-1.2.0.jar gems/ specifications/
% cd ..
% ls
...  scrapi-1.2.0.jar  ...
% rm -rf scrapi-tmp/
% cd ..

add following line in config/environment.rb

require 'lib/scrapi-1.2.0.jar'

With dev_appserver.sh or appspot.com,  rubygems load fine with steps above.
But executing ruby script by jruby command, cannot load rubygems.

I found only one way, shown below, to load scrapi in jar file.

require "file:///path/to/rubygems/scrapi-1.2.0.jar!gems/scrapi-1.2.0/lib/scrapi"

Maybe there are better ways than this.  If there are, please share in the comments below, thanks!

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Vado - iMovie 01

Hi, I’m an editor of messa.tv. Today I’ll explain how to edit videos taken by our favorite cam Vado HD.

That is because iMovie 7.1.4 doesn’t support container format of Vado HD. To make a long story short, can’t use AVI format. Need to convert to some formats or through iMovie away if you don’t want to lose video quality.

OK, let’s start it.

First of all, you need to get the MPEG Streamclip (Free App). Install the MPEG Streamclip and launch it then select your video file.

Vado - iMovie 02

Choose [File] > [Export to MPEG-4]

Vado - iMovie 03

Videos which taken by Vado HD have these kind of file informations. (By VLC media player.)

Vado - iMovie 04

Now we need to be careful to pick the better format to keep video quality.

• [Quality] to [100 %]
• [Sound] > [Channel] to [Mono]
• [Sound] > [Bit Rate] to [128 kbps]

Vado - iMovie 05

Then click [Make MP4] to create a video file.

Vado - iMovie 06

File informations may broken when you check it by VLC media player but don’t care about it, keep on.

It’s time to launch iMovie.

Vado - iMovie 07

[File] >［Import Movies］

Vado - iMovie 08

Fill out your favorite settings. Videos are saved on here:

/Users/{USERNAME}/Movies/iMovie Events/{EVENTNAME}

Vado - iMovie 09

Done! Enjoy!

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