The Rawpinions Weblog

I spend tons of hours a day infront of my PC, and sometimes when I really need to speak to a friend of mine who’s not online I have no choice but to call them on their mobile phone.  Ok…to be honest, I only ever call my sister haha, and we spend hours on the phone.

But yeah, I call a few other people once or twice…a year.

As for people calling me…did I ever mention my fear of picking up the phone? It’s true…it freaks me out on a very serious level.  I can’t explain it.  Please don’t call me…ever.  Unless you enjoy my panic attacks.

Anyway, my phone bill this month has shot up to 200-300 yuan ($29 - $44).  Ever since December 2006 when I actually paid 1000 yuan for that month alone, I had been trying my best to cut it down to 50 - 100 yuan per month.  So I sort of overdid it this month.

Enough BLAH for now, here’s how to use Skype (China) aka “Tom-Skype” for cheaper calls.

*You don’t need to create a new account, you can use the one you have.

1 - Download & Install Tom-Skype. Apparently, you can only do this on the “Tom-Skype” software and not the ones you download from the English (official) website.  Download Tom-Skype HERE (click on the green button).

2 - Buy Credit. Here’s the direct link if you’re going to use your China debit card.  You’ll see a bunch of cards on the page, what you want is to select any of the bottom 4 cards (depending on the denomination you want):
- RMB 100 for 900 minutes
- RMB 50 for 400 minutes
- RMB 20 for 150 minutes
- RMB 5 for 30 minutes

Then fill in both box fields below, with your Skype username -> Click the button -> Pay!

3 - Call Somebody…Anybody! How do you make a call? Simple.  Add an asterisk “*” right before the number you want to dial.  Did I mention it only works for China numbers? Ok, so it should look like this:
Mobile numbers: (+86)*13812345678
Landlines: (+86)(city code)(number)

**Here’s the thing though - I don’t know if the receiver has to pay when they pick up your call…so it’s best you call their landline.

BUT IS THERE AN EVEN CHEAPER WAY???

I think so…but I haven’t tried it yet (but I will…).

“Unlimited Calls to Landlines…” and China is in the list! What they really mean by “unlimited” is that you get 10′000 calling minutes for a price of $5.95 a month.  But in this case, you won’t be able to use your local (China) debit card.  You’ll have to use Moneybookers and whatever it is that’s usually compatible with Skype.

Ok, so I’m a few days late - tough! I now have Firefox 3 installed so I thought rawpinions.com deserved to be the first site I visited…man, I was on Firefox 2 for ages!

>>> Download Firefox 3 at Filehippo.com!

The browser seems somewhat wider…I can’t seem to figure out how they’ve done it.  My bookmarks have remained intact, so I’m glad I was too lazy to save them somewhere else before the installation (because I didn’t have to).

The Bad: Some add-ons are not yet compatible with the latest Firefox version.

Strangely, I almost forgot to mention that I’m now on Skype.  In fact, I already had an account for years except I stopped using it until last week.  I was going to buy some credits using Moneybookers but I think China’s got special prices for local calls…provided that you buy the credits using RMB.  But I can’t be too sure yet.

Oh…and I tried buying my mum credit after I made her a Skype account, and Skype didn’t allow me to pay using my Moneybookers account.  According to them, the email address has to be the same.  Weird.

I was checking out the config.php and I noticed the ‘utf8′ without the hyphen (utf-8). So I created a test post and guess what: the characters showed up. How was I supposed to know that the hyphen makes a huge difference (I didn’t code the config.php by the way! Arrgghh! Wow, we really do learn something new everyday. Anyway, to you guys updating to Wordpress 2.5.1 (you kind of have to because there’s a security fix), you might want to add the hyphen before you run upgrade.php especially if you’ve got characters in your posts.

Some of you might realize that my blog’s gone a bit odd. I updated to Wordpress 2.5.1 yesterday and had to spend all morning repairing my database - manually! I honestly can’t believe they’ve released this version. There are bugs on the admin panel and worst: the update went all wrong! Now all the Chinese characters I had have turned into symbols and/or question marks. The updating has also messed up my categories and have added odd symbols to the earlier posts (what’s up with character compatibility?). Wordpress, you guys are experts - don’t you know when to label something as a beta???

When I was scheming through the database, I found a whole lot of blog links that I had never seen before. Now I’m going to have to do some asking around to find out if I’m actually giving any of these Wordpress developers backlinks.

After this post I’m going to try to reload my backup, and reinstall 2.5.0 and update the posts only. I’m finally learning a bit about SQL databases…and it’s not even funny.

Update: I’ve been able to fix the categories.

I have to admit, PC Tool’s Spyware Doctor is definitely my #1 choice when it comes to combating spyware. So when I found out there was a promotion going for version 5.0 I seized the opportunity and got a free license. Not once did I have a spyware/malware found on my PC. I’m also using AVG Free Edition so if there’s something wrong with my machine, at least one of the anti-malware would inform me.

My Spyware Doctor version expired about one or two weeks ago and all of a sudden it has found spyware on my PC. I’m required to renew my license if I want the spyware gone.

This is not the first time this is happening. A few years ago when I was on version 3, I only got spyware after my license expired.

There’s something fishy going on here…is it just a coincidence that I get spyware AFTER my software license expired? It’s quite ridiculous really. Thing is, if Spyware Doctor has found malware on your computer, they will list it on the results after the scan. How is it that they weren’t able to find anything for all these months?

I was about to click on the ‘renew’ button, but I’ve changed my mind. Any company who can build such a great brand has a knack of playing with people’s mind. So for now, they can go ahead and get millions of people to renew their license. Call me when there’s another promotion going on.

Wordpress version 2.5 has been officially released. Read about it here: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

I’ve already updated, and it does have a lot of changes. I have to admit, it does take a bit of getting used to. The big change can mainly be seen by site authors who get to see the admin panel. HUGE difference. Nevertheless, you should always have the latest software versions so if you’re on Wordpress, make sure you update!

Current Mood: Alarmed

Wordpress version 2.3.2 has been released and it has been labelled as an “urgent security release” so make sure you update to that! Just did, and unless my CHMODs aren’t set properly, everything should be working fine.

For more information on this release, check it out at the Wordpress official site here: http://wordpress.org/development/2007/12/wordpress-232/

And if you don’t care to read it but you really want to update to whatever it is, go directly to the Wordpress download page here: http://wordpress.org/download/

Current Mood: Flirtatious

There are lots of ways to make those popular shiny buttons you see a lot these days. Here’s a tutorial on how I make the simple ones. You can either do it my way or come up with your own unique way of doing them.

1 - First, select your canvas size. I like buttons that aren’t too small and aren’t too big, so I’ll go with 100×25 (pixels).

2 - Set your foreground colour to the main colour you want to use, and choose a background colour. The background colour is usually the darker shade of the main colour you’ve selected, but it all depends on the effect you want to create. In this case, we’ll use pink as the main colour, and white as the background colour.

3 - Create a new layer and use the gradient tool on the canvas to come up with something like this:

4 - Create a new layer and use the rectangular marquee tool to select the top half portion of your canvas:

5 - You can now continue the simple way, or the more complicated way. For the more simple way and for a quick finish, do the following:

6 - You still have half of the canvas selected by the marquee tool. Simply paint inside the selected area using white paint. Then bring ‘fill’ from 100% to 25%. © Rawpinions.com

7 - There you have it, your quick & simple shiny button. You can use text to write whatever you want on the button.

8 - If you want to continue on to a less simple-looking button, you can have additional effects:

9 - To add a border, create a new layer and use the rectangle marquee tool to select the entire canvas.

10 - On the menu bar, go to select > modify > contract.

11 - Contract selection by 1 pixel.

12 - Use the paint tool to paint all over the selected part of the canvas. You can use any colour to do this because this layer will be transparent anyway. To make this layer transparent, just move the fill from 100% to 0%:

13 - Double-click on the current selected layer (the one that you made transparent). The ‘layer style’ properties box should automatically pop-up. You will see a ’stroke’ check box, which you should select. You can click on the word ’stroke’ to modify its properties. Change the colour to anything you want it to be, and change the size to ‘1′ pixel.

14 - If you stop now, you’ll get a button that looks like this:

15 - If you want to continue just a bit more, you can do the following: create another layer and add another border to the button like the previous step. But this time, instead of selecting ‘1′ pixel at contract selection, select ‘2′ pixels instead.

16 - Change the stroke colour to white (or your background colour) for a light effect. After shifting the transparency fill to 0%, modify the opacity fill to 10-20%. You should end up with something like this:

You might not think the littlest changes matter, but they kinda do.

Current Mood: Cool

I’m going to quickly take a note of this in case someone needs it in the future (and it was also difficult for me to find this information on the web…

I had problems installing VBulletin the other day because my hosting offers PHP in safe mode…

I uploaded the whole ‘upload’ file into the folder I wanted to use the Vbulletin (in my case it was /forum).� I then created the database on the CPanel of my site.

After modifying the config.php.new to config.php, I then changed the config.php file to suit my site and database settings.

What you then have to do is to change the CHMOD file permissions:
Folders - 755
Java /.js files - 755
PHP files - 644

Because I wasn’t aware that my server had PHP on safe mode, I didn’t know that the PHP files had to be 644…when I uploaded everything, all files had the CHMOD permissions default set to 600, while folders were set 700.� So I thought changing the install folder to ‘777′ (because I kept getting 403 Forbidden error) would finally get things to work but it didn’t.� It just gave me a 505 Internal Server error.

So after asking around on one of the excellent forums I’m a member of, someone told me to simply change the CHMOD to 644.� I then couldn’t get some settings to work…esp. the ones that had to be executed.� So I changed the java files to 755 and voila, now everything’s working like they should.� I don’t really know if having the js files on 755 poises any security risks but I need to work on the site, so I need things this way at the moment.� Will ask around and if I don’t edit this, it means it should be ok.

Strangely, the VBulletin member support advised me to tell my server to change the settings away from PHP safe mode…weird response?

When I had the javascript� problems, they told me:
1 - It’s probably because I’m not using the default template but a template that’s not that compatible with the VB version I’m using
2 - My forum settings aren’t right!

Thing is, they have people buying VB� almost every single day.� At the support forum, there are people asking them to sort out their installation problems almost every single minute of the day.� So I was surprised that it wasn’t the VB member support who helped me with these simple problems that I’m sure is faced every single day by many others.

Worse of all, they jumped to the conclusion that I had my forum settings wrong…? That was quite nasty…

But anyway, I’ll keep this issue on the blog so it might be useful for someone who google search the same thing I did the other day when I didn’t get the search result I wanted! Hope this is some helpful information, and hope you enjoy your VB!

Current Mood: Cool

Ok seriously if you’ve never heard of the Vbulletin software then I don’t think you know much about the internet. That said, I bought my first-ever VBulletin (owned) license about half a day ago…it’s something I’ve been waiting for, for such a long time now! VBulletin is the “Mercedes” of forum softwares. So apart from ’security’ and overall ‘quality’ reasons, VBulletin is a ‘branded’ forum…

An owned license costs $160, and a lease license costs $80. The similarity between the licenses is that you get access to the membership section of the official VB site. You also get quality support & updates for an entire year. The difference however is that the lease license is only valid for one year, while the owned license remains valid forever.

A VB license allows you to install the forum anywhere on your site, but you can only have one installation on your site (you can’t use one license for multiple installations).

The advantage of buying an owned license is that you can transfer (resell) your license to someone if you no longer want to use it. Also, if you want an extra year of updates and member support, you only have to pay an extra $30.

For a lease license however, I doubt you’re allowed to transfer it.

I was going to use SMF but when I saw the ‘first look’ at VB 3.7 (Beta release) it looked so web 2.0 that I fell in love with it!

CHECK IT OUT HERE

I haven’t gotten round to installing it however, but I’ll do so in a few hours (not on this site).

Anyway, I’m off to sleep for an hour or so. I’m so tired…I need to get up at about 5am to attend a forum Xmas party, should be fun!