As much as I love the program, it’s always possible to switch to a different program, but I had a different problem: many of my ebooks had been downloaded directly within the app itself, and I didn’t have copies anywhere else. Some of these, in turn, were no longer available for download. (A good example of this are books from sites such as the Baen Free Library.)

I took a look at iTunes sharing as a possibility for rescuing the books, but Stanza doesn’t share the books for downloading from the phone. I then spent some time figuring out what did work, and here’s what I found:

First off, you need an app that lets you look at the file directory on the iPhone. I used an OS X app called PhoneView, though I have no doubt there are others. (Incidentally or not, my iPhone is NOT jailbroken!)

1. Within PhoneView, select “Stanza” in the “Apps” list.
2. Go into the .Stanza folder. (If it’s not visible, go into Preferences and check the “Show Entire Disk” checkbox.)
3. Within .Stanza, your books are in the “Library” folder. Copy this folder to the hard drive of your computer.
4. I’ve noticed that the directories can be shown a bit differently depending on the program you’re using to view them. to be clear: within Stanza’s directory, you’re looking for this folder: /Documents/.Stanza/Library/
5. Quit PhoneView.

Okay, now you have a folder on your computer that contains a whole bunch of numbered folders: “0″, “1″, “2″ and so on. These contains your books, which unfortunately are still a bit inconvenient. Your books are the files that have no extension, e.g. “30″. All you really need is to add file extensions to the filenames, but first you have to figure out what extension to add (and the name of the book is helpful too!).

What I did was to open the files in a text editor. (On a Mac you can use the free TextWrangler; on Windows, you might try the free Notepad++.) You’ll see a whole lot of gobbledegook, but the file format can probably be determined by text found in the first line of the file. Generally, the name of the book is ther very first thing in the file, or close to it.

• If you see “epub”, or (in the case of TextWrangler) it opens up as an “xml container”, you’re looking at an Epub file. Close the file and add “.epub” to the end.
• If you see “PNRdPPrs”, that’s a Palm Doc file. Add “.pdb” to the filename.

Stanza reads a whole lot of file types, although these are the only two I’ve encountered. Also likely are .mobi files, and I’ll update this article as I come across other format hints. But suffice it to say that after adding the file extensions, the files will work in another e-reader capable of reading that format.

I also use a program called Calibre to organize my ebooks, and conveniently it can also convert between formats — so if you want to put an Epub or Palm book on your Kindle, say, Calibre can convert it for you.

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I made a PDF form for my company’s web site using Adobe Acrobat 8. In a couple places I have a “radio” control — that’s where you can select one, and only one, option from multiple choices. If you tick one box, all the others in that set are turned off. When distributing the blank form, however, I want all of the options to be blank. No default — the user has to pick one.

Here’s the issue: In the course of making the form, I checked one of the options, and now I can’t turn it off to distribute the form. I hunted around and got a lot of useless “you should use a checkbox instead” answers. No, I don’t need a checkbox, I just need to un-fill this field.

So how do you blank the field? You add an extra radio button to the set. Flip over to Preview, click the extra box. Back to Edit mode, delete that button. Voila! Blank radio buttons.

You’re welcome.

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I hunted over the web looking for a way to search an entire MySQL database — all tables, all fields — for text. For the most part I find forums with answers such as “Well, you set up your database wrong”. These kinds of responses remind me of the sequence in the movie “Funny Farm” where the truck driver is trying to find the town of Redbud. In short:

“Hey Mac, how do you get to Redbud?”

“If I wanted to go to Redbud, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Nonsensical and useless. If you’re here now, then this is where you’re starting from; telling me to start from somewhere else is simply a non-answer. Funny in a movie, but frustrating in real life.

Today I came across a most excellent script, the MySQL Database Search & Replace Tool. It’s a PHP page that you can drop into a web site and call from your browser. It will search the entire database for a string of text — exactly what I needed.

In a quick test run it threw out a couple errors but then gave me useful results; so it’s not entirely polished, but quite functional and useful. Kudos to Mark Jackson and Eric Amundson for releasing this great tool!

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So I needed a new one, but didn’t want to drop a grand on it. What to do? Well, I found a fixer-upper on eBay for just over $400. Impressively, it’s last year’s model Macbook with maxed out RAM and a good size hard drive. The down side is that it lacks an optical drive, and the keyboard is en Español.

Got the computer in the mail Tuesday. Thanks to “Target Disk Mode” via Firewire, I was able to wipe the drive and install the OS without an optical drive. Had a small hiccough transferring my old data from my Time Machine backup, in that I had forgotten that my backup doesn’t include my applications. Re-doing the transfer from my bootable backup drive fixed that nicely.

So — I’ll be putting about another $100 into the computer, as I got an English keyboard assembly for $30, and an optical drive for about $75 (both on eBay). I even found an online auction for the *brackets* for the optical drive, which is handy since the computer I bought had the drive completely removed (“it was making a funny noise” I’m told).

So now I get to do surgery. Cool! I replaced the hard drive in the Powerbook a couple years back, so I have a bit of experience with cracking open laptops. Should be an interesting exercise, involving steady hands and very, very small screwdrivers.

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I did a bit of grepping and parsing just now, and in the hopes that it might be of use to my fellow WordPress hackers, here is my list of every defined CONSTANT in the latest WordPress 2.7-bleeding setup.
(...)
Read the rest of WordPress Constants (170 words)

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This is worth looking at if you write WP plugins, even if you’re pretty experienced — if for nothing more than to check that you’re not missing something….

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I just wanted to put on the record that the error had nothing to do with what I described in that article, in which we turned version 0.2 of the plugin into a working version 0.3.

The error was in fact a small-but-significant oversight in the process of turning out version 0.4, which, beyond shutting me down for a few hours, you haven’t seen yet. Funny, it worked just fine on my local test blog — not sure why, actually….

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

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WordPress version 2.6 is going to be released very soon. Until I have had time to test Virtual Multiblog on WP 2.6, I recommend that you not upgrade WordPress past 2.5.1.

I’ve always said that the VMB system is quite future-proof, “unless WordPress makes significant changes to wp-config.php”. Well, WP 2.6 allows users to change the location of that critical file, and the wp-content folder. Either one of these changes may have ramifications for Virtual Multiblog.

Hang Tight folks. I’ll test it out and let you know.

if somebody daring does take the plunge, I would appreciate any problem reports.

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