flyingpylon blog

no matter where I go... there I am.

The New Kindle... Resistance is Not Quite Futile

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via amazon.com

At the new low price of just $139 for the 3rd generation (wi-fi only) Kindle, it's getting harder and harder to resist... right up until I remember that Amazon expects me to "license" my books rather than buy and own them.

At just a few dollars less for a Kindle version of a book, the tradeoff is not worth it for me. So they'll either need to fix the licensing model or lower the price of the book license.

Very cool device though. Gotta love the argument against trying to compete with the iPad: "You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets."

Wordpress Automatic Plugin Upgrades on Windows

Perhaps this will help someone. I have Wordpress blogs running on Linux servers, but my development machine runs Windows. I like to have Wordpress installed locally so that I can test things via http://localhost before publishing them to the world.

The problem I always ran into was that when new versions of plugins were released I could use the automatic upgrade feature on the "live" site but never on my development machine.  I would always get an error message saying that the previous version of the plugin could not be removed, and therefore the new version could not be installed.  I knew that Windows file security was at the root of the problem but I never felt like investigating the fix.

Turns out it's really simple. All you need to do is set the file permissions on the wp-content directory (or perhaps just the plugins directory if you prefer) such that the IUSR_yourcomputername account has sufficient access to delete the files. 

That's it!