Get back Windows 10 functions in Windows 11

Microsoft, when they rolled out Windows 11, made some changes to their File Explorer that slowed me down as a developer. I needed to restore the Windows 10 behavior. The Windows 11 task bar always combines icons from multiple instances of the same app into one. To find the instance you want you have to … Read more

Install an old MariaDB version on Ubuntu

Do you need to install an old version of MariaDB on Ubuntu? Maybe you need to do some testing. Here’s how. Visit https://mariadb.com/downloads/ and choose your package and OS. You’ll download a tar fie. Extract the tar file with tar xf mariadb*.tar. Change your working directory to the extracted directory. cd mariadb*debs Set up your … Read more

Reindexing tables with bad dates

Sometimes, upon adding indexes to MariaDb or MySQL tables with columns with zero-default dates you’ll get an error message like this: This happens because your server’s default sql_mode includes the NO_ZERO_DATE value. It is prevalent when working on WordPress indexes using phpmyadmin or some other MySQL client program. To prevent it, change the sql_mode before … Read more

Legacy MySQL VMs

Installing old versions of MySQL is a giant pain. An AskUbuntu contributor gave a workable procedure. Need to run MySQL 5.5? Download this VM. Running MySQL 5.7 is easier. Install Ubuntu 18.04, then do sudo apt install mysql-server-5.7 .

WordPress multisite programming tricks

This pulls together some notes on handling plugin programming for WordPress multisite (network) installations. Basic information Lots of this information comes from the globally instantiated $wpdb object. Tables To get a list of WordPress tables you can use the wpdb::tables() method. Here’s a quick way to get a useful list of tables. This list include … Read more

From around the ‘toobz: articles marking the 50th anniversary of Friedman’s article

Milton Friedman wrote an article called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” fifty years ago. It is here. Here are some articles marking that anniversary, for reference. Some of them challenge the status quo Friedman established back then. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times Tom Poldre, B Lab UK Article about … Read more

Half a century of this is enough: Friedman’s piece saying business must be irresponsible

Fifty years ago come this Sunday, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman (a professor of economics at The University of Chicago) published a piece in the New York Times called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” Invoking the socialist bogeyman, he argues that businesses should focus only on increasing their profits. … Read more

Bar codes (QR Codes) for web sites

I was really getting tired of the Wookiee look. So, I called the barber who usually takes care of that for me. She said they don’t allow walk-in customers because of the pandemic, and proceeded to read me a long URL over the phone to make an appointment. Generally I’m a geek and a Mr. … Read more