I woke up this morning to find a surprise on the floor near my bed…

Carpet prawn

As I started inventorying my gadgets, looking at all of the serial number barcodes gave me some ideas on how to improve my scanning process. I made a series of revisions to my AppleScript to let it handle serial numbers whenever possible.
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I recently purchased a USB-based barcode scanner with the intention of using it with Delicious Library to do a home inventory (their Bluetooth scanner is just to pricey for me). Unfortunately, the scanner model I purchased – a Datalogic QuickScan QD2130 – has problems acting as a keyboard with OS X. It works fine under Windows, but when connected to my Mac, it sits in a disabled mode and won’t scan any barcodes. Leafing through the manual, I noticed that it will also act as an RS-232 device over USB, and that gave me an idea…
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Some of you may remember the sinful dating ad I posted a while ago. Earlier this week, while talking to my un-boss on Messenger, I saw this ad at the bottom of the window:

What is this trying to say? If you start dating people you find on their site, all of your friends will give up on you? I can assure all of my friends: nothing will change; I gave up on you long ago.

I saw this at my local grocery a few weeks ago:

I can understand the importance of telling employees not to continue stocking recalled product, but shouldn’t they also remove it from the shelves?

After a frustrating experience a few weeks ago discovering that someone had already registered my preferred username on Twitter, I finally signed up as JudgeOfCheese. And now I’ve just installed Alex King’s very neat Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress. I just have to figure out why the sidebar widget is missing the title, but that will wait until after dinner. mmmm… dinner

Aaron gave me a great suggestion for the WordPress MU update script: pull the latest version directly from the download page. So I’ve added that as an alternative method. If no specific version is passed in, the script will pull down the latest, determine what version it is and check to see if it already exists before continuing with the installation (upgrade-wordpress-mu.sh).

I haven’t actually had the chance to fully run it through its paces yet, so we’ll see for sure when the next update is released.

I’m happy to report that I just had the chance to test my WordPress MU upgrade script, and everything went off without a hitch! One simple command and all of my blogs got the update to 2.6.5. Glory be!

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m really bad about upgrading my WordPress MU install in a timely manner. And that’s a pretty big disservice, especially for others (like my brother) hosted on the same install. So tonight, I put together a new directory structure for my WPMU installation, and with my brother’s help, wrote a wonderful little shell script to handle future upgrades for me.

Originally, I had WordPress MU file sitting in a WPMU directory. With each upgrade, I’d have to make sure I didn’t disrupt the existing important files (like those in wp-content).

My new structure involves a version-specific directory within the WPMU folder (eg wordpress-mu-2.6.3). Alongside that is a directory named const, to hold all of the files that remain constant between upgrades. Finally, there’s a symlink named current that points to the current version-specific directory. I then create additional symlinks within this directory back to files and directories in const.

I’ve attached a sanitized copy of the final script (upgrade-wordpress-mu.sh) for your pleasure. It first checks to make that it’s running as root – my WPMU installation is outside the scope of my home directory, so that’s a necessity. There’s a few more checks to make sure the user has specified a version, and that there’s an archive of the WordPress MU files for that version. Then it goes to town, extracting the files, and symlinking the relevant items in const. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty, since it’s all pretty self-evident from the script.

If you do choose to use this yourself, just be sure to change the path on line 27 (unless that really is where you want your files).

While talking to my brother today about my American Express card, I ran across something in their frequently asked questions that I’ve been trying to find:

What if a merchant does not accept my American Express Card?
To report incidences where merchants do not accept your American Express Card, please click here. American Express Customer Service will then follow up with the merchant to ensure that American Express Cards will be accepted in the future.

While I like the idea of encouraging merchants to accept AmEx, I’m really curious how they “ensure” it. My guess is they send around a couple of hired goons to make sure the merchant agreement gets signed, but I could be wrong.

What I really like, though, is that one of the options is “Merchant insisted on a minimum/maximum purchase amount”. It’s been a while since I’ve run into this, but I find it to be terribly obnoxious when I do (and it’s against every merchant agreement out there). My old method for dealing with those business was to buy enough to satisfy the minimum and then return whatever it was I didn’t want. That way, I only spent as much as I’d originally intended, and their stupid policy ended up costing them extra. Yes, I’m that spiteful.