David.R.Gilson

David’s links of the week May 5th through June 14th:

• Top 10 Most Effective Job Search Websites – With the world economic climate still painfully low, more folks are losing their jobs than ever before. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. unemployment rate hit over 9 percent in May 2009. France unemployment jumped to 8.2 percent, Germany was at 7.6 percent in January, and the UK was at 6.77 percent in March. It’s imperative that job seekers have all of the tools at their disposal to find new work. High unemployment rates don’t necessarily mean that there’s no work, it often means that the fields where there are available jobs are changing. For this reason, I’d like to offer a list of the top 10 most effective job search websites to help MakeUseOf readers land that new dream job as quickly as possible.
• How to backup your MySQL tables and data every night using a bash script and cron – base64.co.uk

  software development tutorials and code snippets covering : Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL amp; classic Visual Basic 6.
  How to backup your MySQL tables and data every night using a bash script and cron

  published : 01.Apr.2005

  I now offer an off site MySQL database backup service, if you need a reliable a backup solution for your on-line database, please take a look.

  Summary:
  This tutorial will show you how to write a simple bash shell script which will extract your database schema, compress the data and email you the backup. Utilising cron, this script can be configured to run in the early hours of the morning when your web server is least active.

  After completing your database enabled web site, you need an automated method for backing up all that valuable data. Below is a bash shell script which can be used to backup all your clients databases using a nightly cron job.

• How to Backup And Install Your Linux Applications With AptOnCD – Make Tech Easier – Everytime after you have reformatted the hard disk and reinstalled the Linux distro of your choice, the one troublesome thing that you need to do is to re-download all your applications and restore all the settings. This is made worst when your wireless connection just don’t work with the newly installed distro. How are you going to download all your applications when you can’t even connect to the Internet?
• 10 Windows Command Line Tips You Should Check Out – Linux geeks are proud of their command line prowess and generally have some tricks up their sleeves. While the Windows command line is not considered as powerful as a Linux’s, here are some Windows command line tips and tricks not everyone might know about.
• Save money on your Mobile Phone bill – Save money on your mobile bills when calling 0800 and other non-geographical numbers

  Most mobile phone providers in the UK still charge their customers for calls to 0800, 0808 and 0500 numbers, and normally at higher rates than they charge for calling a land line, but there is a way around this. Mobile Fun recently stumbled upon 0800Buster. They operate a service that lets you call these numbers using your mobiles inclusive minutes, by providing you with a UK land line number to dial instead.

• How to Get a Quake-style Drop-down Terminal in Linux – Make Tech Easier – A lot of games out there have some form of command prompt, often just for entering cheat codes. You know the type – you hit some function key and a bar drops down from the top of the screen letting you enter commands or codes or whatever else. Well some clever folks have taken that design and applied it to the command prompt in your Linux desktop. You can get a fully featured, skinnable terminal with split-screen views and all at the touch of a button. Yakuake is just such a program. It’s been around for a few years but has remained below the radar for most Linux users.
• Web life: Phun – physicsworld.com – Phun is a free, downloadable physics-simulation programme that bills itself as a “2D physics sandbox”. The programme’s limitless virtual space allows users to construct simple (and not-so-simple) machines out of levers, gears, motors and as many different shapes as they care to draw, then set them in motion. The results can be educational, bizarre or downright hilarious, depending on what you choose to do, but thanks to a sophisticated simulation engine, they will always be physically realistic — unless you decide to turn off friction and gravity.
• The unique universe – physicsworld.com – Many cosmological theories not only see our universe as one of many but also claim that time does not exist. Lee Smolin argues against the timeless multiverse
• Make Tech Easier – How To Compress A Video File with Virtualdub – Anyone who has played around with any kind of video knows how huge uncompressed video files can be. The huge size of video files is what has led to the proliferation of video compression algorithms like DivX, Xvid, MP4 etc, but how exactly do you compress an uncompressed video to one of these formats, to save space and maintain your sanity ?
• Make Tech Easier – Ubuntu: How to Mount iso, Bin And Cue Files Directly From Nautilus – We have covered the easy way to mount iso images in Windows. This time round, we are going to cover the easy way to mount an iso, bin or cue file in Ubuntu without having to hit the terminal every time.

  With the use of fuesiso and nautilus-actions, we can easily create an option in Nautilus to mount the CD images right from the context menu (mouse right click).

• Make Tech Easier – Mastering the Bash History – The Bourne Again Shell, better known as bash, is the default for most Linux distributions. It’s extremely powerful as far as command shells go, and holds all kinds of nifty tricks for those willing to learn. One of the best features is, in my opinion, the command history system.

  There are many options to use with the bash history, some of them I use nearly every time I open a command shell. Today I’ll be covering some of the most useful aspects of the history, but I certainly won’t be able to cover them all.

• Make Tech Easier – Gaming In Linux (Ubuntu) – Gaming in Linux is always a big issue. Many gamers are not willing to migrate to Linux (though they are not happy with Windows) because they are worried about the lack of support for gaming. This is really a big myth, since there are really plenty of great games in Linux.

  In case you are wondering what choices of game you have in Linux (Ubuntu), here are my top 10 list.

• Make Tech Easier – Things You Need To Know To Become An Apt Guru – Quite possibly the most distinguishing feature of Debian-based Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix, etc) is their package system – APT. Also known as the Advanced Package Tool, APT was first introduced in Debian 2.1 in 1999. APT is not so much a specific program as it is a collection of separate, related packages.

  With APT, Linux gained the ability to install and manage software packages in a much simpler and more efficient way than was previously possible. Before its introduction, most software had to be installed either by manually compiling the source code, or using individual packages with no automatic dependency handling (such as RPM files). This could mean hours of “dependency hell” even to install a fairly trivial program.

• Make Tech Easier – The Ultimate Guide To Manage Your Audio/Video Files In Linux – Have you ever come across a situation where you wanted to convert a video from one format to another in your Linux machine and you have absolutely no idea how to do it? What about playing DVD on Ubuntu or rip your favorite VCD to mpeg file?

  Below, I have come up with a great list of software that you can use to handle your video/audio files in Linux. All the software listed are compatible with any of the Linux distros out there. The installation instructions and screenshots are based on Ubuntu, so if you are on a different distro, you will have to change the command accordingly.

• Make Tech Easier – How To Control Your CPU Frequency In Ubuntu – Needless to say, conserving your battery power is the most important task when you are on the move with your laptop. Other than disabling all unused programs by shutting down them during the startup, one of the great way to save battery power is to reduce the running frequency of your CPU. The slower frequency the CPU runs, the less power it consumes.

  In your Ubuntu, you can easily switch your CPU frequency via the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Gnome-applets.

• Using Spotify Links In Linux – The Atheist Blogger – I’ve yet to officially start my tutorials on Linux, but I’ve been playing around with Spotify recently and I’ve been annoyed by the problem of getting Spotify playlists to load from my web browser directly into Spotify. For those who don’t know about Spotify, I suggest you read my previous post, and if you still want invites, I am getting them on a daily basis, so please apply. Spotify playlists can be shared easily in the form of a link, and there have been several websites set up to publish these links. The problem of using these links in Linux consists of two issues:
• [Jaunty] synaptics driver needs to be updated to work with devices known as "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad" and "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" starting with 2.6.28 series kernels – solved my non working touchpad by doing in terminal:

  modprobe -r psmouse
  modprobe psmouse proto=imps

  at this time the touchpad should be working

  and add: options psmouse proto=imps
  to: gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

  best of luck.

• Quick and dirty guide to rsync | The Sillican Files – rsync is a software application for Unix systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Since this is supposed to be a quick tutorial, we’ll skip the formal lecture and get on with some usage examples.
• How To Build a Social Networking Site using Wordpress | MakeUseOf.com – To create a social networking site, you can either register a free account with a ahird party social networks provider or install open source software on your server and be your own administrator. There are pros and cons in these two methods. The first method allows you to handle your social networks without any technical knowledge, but you risk losing all your data when the third party site close down. The latter requires you to have certain technical knowledge, but you get full control over every single detail in your site.
• Make Tech Easier – Useful Firefox Shortcut Keys (and Cheatsheet Download) – I like using the keyboard as much as possible because it makes me feel more productive. In my opinion, moving your hand over to the mouse is unnecessary the majority of the time because most applications provide very convenient keyboard shortcuts. Today we will discuss the most useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to navigate the Internet faster, thus getting more work (or play) done.

Okay so what the heck happened to the site on Thursday night?

It all boiled down to running out of storage quota on my server. My server account had crept over its quota limit without me knowing. Things were still working like this, but since Wordpress 2.8 (the software that runs this website) came out on Thursday I ran the upgrade, and then we hit problems.

Anyway, lots of technical details later storage quota was extended and the site was put back as it was, and subsequently upgrade to WP 2.8.

Why am I telling you all this? Well the moral of the story is that no matter what you’re doing – keep backups of everything you do! Had I not had backups of this site, it would be trashed now. Moreover, had my backups been better organised, the site would have been up several hours sooner.

I’ve now improved my file backup procedures to be automatic so they’re always up to date. Fortunately, I was already using a Wordpress plugin which e-mailed me a daily backup of my database.

Make sure you keep your stuff backed up too.

David’s links of the week March 24th through March 29th:

• ChkFlsh checks your Flash Drives on Windows | MakeUseOf.com – Do you have a flash drive that is a little bit iffy? Are you just a geek and like to run checks against… well anything that you can run tests against? Are you worried that your flash drive might be failing?If you have answered yes to any (or all) of these three questions than have i got a free application for you! I have been using it for a little while now and I must say it does exactly what it says it will do. It will check your Flash Drive for bad blocks or in errors in reading and writing to it.

  Think of it as putting your Flash Drive through the test, and it does work for normal, regular other drives as well.

  SSD drives are still pretty damn expensive and you do not want to start using a damaged drive then you can use this to test those drives also.

• Flash Countdown Timer Generator – Create a countdown for your blog, website, or myspace page -
• Simple Yearly Archive Plugin – Wordpress, Plugin, Option, Beiträge, Kategorien, Archive – SCHLOEBE.DE – Personal Portfolio von Oliver Schlöbe – Simple Yearly Archive ist ein recht einfaches Wordpress Plugin, das die Wordpress-Archive nicht wie gewohnt monatsbasierend darstellt, sondern in einer jahresbasierenden Liste. Es entsteht quasi eine Art Jahresarchiv. Übergeordnet werden die Jahre angezeigt, in denen Beiträge geschrieben wurden, darunter die geschriebenen Beiträge. Darüber hinaus lässt sich einstellen, welche Kategorien angezeigt werden sollen.
• Five Free Temporary Email Services To Avoid Spam – he internet is filled with junk. One of the most common pieces of junk is spam. Many of us are bombarded with spam every day and hate it. Although there are a few email providers that provide great spam filtering services, sometimes that just isn’t enough.Maybe you need to fill in an email for a one-time registration that, you are sure, will only lead to spam. That is where temporary email services come into play. Today we will talk about 5 of those that I highly recommend.
• The TSH Normal Range: Why is There Still Controversy? Insights from One of the Nation’s Leading Endocrinologists, Dr. Jeffrey Garber – here#039;s no question that thyroid treatment is an area of controversy. Perhaps one of the most confusing issues for patients today is the issue of the changing quot;normalquot; reference range for the TSH — thyroid stimulating hormone — test, which is relied on by most conventional practitioners to detect and monitor thyroid problems.

David’s links of the week February 19th through March 4th:

• The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire » Blog Archive » An interview with a vampire author – I recently listened to a free podcast of Kimberly Steele’s vampire novel Forever Fifteen. I thought it was the best vampire novel since Richard Laymon’s The Traveling Vampire Show. Steele’s vampire is Lucy Albert, who was turned into a vampire at the age of 15 after surviving the Black Death in the 1340s in Italy by an ancient vampire, who wanted her for his carnal desires and to ease his lonely, undead existence.The novel is set in 1983 in the United States, where Lucy lives among mortals, posing as an innocent foster child, who moves from family to family while she secretly commits her monthly murders to satisfy her blood cravings.Steele really captured the “otherness” of a vampire living among humans. It’s obvious she put a lot of thought into how a vampire would exist and maintain secrecy over the years. The serial killing scenes were particularly well done.
• Windows Post-Install Wizard Home – Windows Post-Install Wizard (WPI for short) is a hypertext application designed for giving users choice. While Windows XP offers many ways of customizing the setup process out of the box, its major drawback is the lack of being able to select which applications an end user may install. In the past, end users and administrators needed to either download the files manually, or create overly complex scripts that could only be used once. WPI allows you to create one image, which can then be custom configured, and optionally, automated, so that end users can install any applications.
• How To Reinstall Windows Without Losing Your Data | MakeUseOf.com – The Windows XP installation CD includes an option to repair an existing Windows XP installation. Using this option allows you to reinstall Windows without losing the files, personal data and programs you already have on the system. To take advantage of it, just place the CD into your CD or DVD drive on your PC and reboot the computer.
• How To Make Your Own Windows Live CD | MakeUseOf.com – Live CDs as you know allow you to boot your computer from a CD-ROM and performs various functions on your system. Such Live CDs are excellent for recovering data, fixing problems or to have a custom desktop at your disposal when you are not at your own computer.While the Live CDs are common place in the Linux world, it’s not often that you hear about a Windows Live CD.Here today we are going to show you how to make custom Windows Live CD
• How To Create An Unattended Windows XP Disk | MakeUseOf.com – An unattended XP disk is a customized installation disk that allows you to perform a Windows installation with minimal effort (once the disk is created). All of the effort takes place in creating the unattended disk, but it is well worth it. With an unattended XP disk, you can preselect all of the options you wish to use for the installation.
• 13 Alternative Search Engines That Find What Google Can’t | MakeUseOf.com – Google has become the standard search engine of virtually every web-goer on the internet today. In fact “to Google” is pretty much synonymous with “to search”.But that certainly doesn’t mean that other search engines can’t do a decent, if not better, job and this list has been compiled for just this reason.So check out this catalog of awesome alternative search engines that are certain to help you search faster and more efficiently on that World Wide Web.
• 8 Ways To Improve Your WordPress’s Loading Time – Make Tech Easier – f you have been blogging for quite a while, you will find that as your traffic increases, your blog’s loading time become slower and slower. This could be due to inefficient coding, too many images (or advertisement) or just that you have activated too many plugins that take up your valuable server resources. If the above is true for you, then it is time for you to do some spring-cleaning and start to streamline and optimize your site.
• 4 Websites to Learn Cool Linux Command Line Tricks | MakeUseOf.com – Hollywood movies often have a tech geek entering commands and doing amazing things. While it may not be that easy to hack into public transport systems or or control the world like Eagle Eye, the command line is certainly a geeks playground.Want to show off your command line prowess to your geeky friends but don’t know any cool tricks? Well you are in luck. The following websites will give you plenty of tricks and tips to satiate your hunger:
• WordPress Backups « WordPress Codex – Your WordPress database contains every post, every comment and every link you have on your blog. If your database gets erased or corrupted, you stand to lose everything you have written. There are many reasons why this could happen and not all are things you can control. But what you can do is backup your data. After all, it is important. Right?

David’s links of the week January 31st through February 6th:

• The race to build a quantum computer – physicsworld.com – Quantum computation was a highly speculative enterprise facing serious technological obstacles until a shy young physicist came along. Dave Bacon tells the story of Alexei Kitaev’s big idea
• Electricity unplugged – physicsworld.com – However, Tesla did not foresee that people would be willing to drag wires around the entire globe to use electricity. Instead, he dreamed of a way of transferring electrical energy wirelessly over long distances. This would be achieved using big, coupled electromagnetic resonators able to generate very large electric fields, which were meant to propagate most likely either via conduction through the ionosphere (presumably including gigantic sparks) or through the Earth (possibly via intermediate coupling to the Earth’s charge resonances, so-called Schumann resonances). The epitome of Tesla’s efforts to achieve his goal was Wardenclyffe Tower, a 57 m high structure in Long Island that was meant to deliver electricity to the entire planet. The construction was interrupted in about 1905, not because the method was considered impractical or dangerous, but because the funder, the famed financier and banker J P Morgan, was concerned that there would be no way to bill remote electricity users
• CSS should not be used for layout – Seeing as how the CSS wars seem to have flared up again, I thought I would weigh in. I have finally had a chance to really dive in to the details, and I have come to the following conclusion:

  CSS is really cool. It is useful for a lot of things. The basic idea of separating content from presentation is sound. But when it comes to layout, the design of CSS is fundamentally flawed. Use tables instead.

  There, I#039;ve said it. But you might want to hear what I have to say before you release the hounds.

• Cow causes chaos in Hull –
• Press Release Census answers could be passed to snoopers » NO2ID – As NO2ID highlighted in the Queen’s Speech [1], the Coroners and Justice Bill which received its First Reading in the Lords yesterday [2], will turn the Data Protection Act on its head as far as government use of personal information is concerned − giving powers to ministers to override confidentiality and data protection and to use information collected for one purpose for any other purpose.
• Mastering WordPress Shortcodes | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine – ntroduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are powerful but still yet quite unknown WordPress functions. Imagine you could just type “adsense” to display an AdSense ad or “post_count” to instantly find out the number of posts on your blog.

  WordPress shortcodes can do this and more and will definitely make your blogging life easier. In this article, we’ll show you how to create and use shortcodes, as well as provide killer ready-to-use WordPress shortcodes that will enhance your blogging experience.

• Liberty is crucial to democracy – Tony Benn has been a political idol for years. For The Guardian#039;s quot;Liberty Centralquot;, here he present a great argument as to why left-wingers should be concerned by our government#039;s attitudes towards surveillance and civil liberties.
• How To Become A Twitter Rockstar – Sort Of –
• Connected – physicsworld.com –
• How to Friend Mom, Dad, and the Boss on Facebook…Safely – ReadWriteWeb – Oh no! Your mom just joined Facebook and what#039;s even worse, she wants to be your friend. More and more people are finding themselves in this situation today and unsure of what to do. Friending mom and dad, the boss, or other work colleagues opens up the details of your private life for the whole world to see – and you might not be entirely comfortable with that. What#039;s to be done?

David’s links of the week January 10th through January 15th:

• Why Vista’s DRM Is Bad For You – quot;Windows Vista includes an array of quot;featuresquot; that you don#039;t want. These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure. They#039;ll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features won#039;t do anything useful. In fact, they#039;re working against you. They#039;re digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest of the entertainment industry. quot;
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/09/tweetbacks-plugin-for-wordpress/ -
• The Ever Expanding Universe in Modern Cosmology – Since 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, here is something I thought I’d pull out of my personal archive. It is a dissertation I wrote for the third year of my MPhys, reviewing achievements in cosmology between 1916 and 1999. I invite everyone who reads this to add any achievements in cosmology since then in the comments!
• Laying Schrödinger’s Cat to rest – We’re talking about Quantum Physics today, and how one of the most difficult to understand concepts is made twice as confusing as is necessary by one of the most poular popular-science gedankenexperiments (that’s German for “thought experiment”). If you don’t know about Schrödinger’s Cat, then this post probably isn’t for you. Although if you are a fan of physics or popular science (for which I applaud you), then read on.Firstly, I’m going to outline what the “Schrödinger’s Cat” gedankenexperiment is actually meant to demonstrate, then once we understand that, I’ll look at what’s wrong with how the gedankenexperiment is presented to the public.
• Turn your thumb drive into your digital lifeboat Part 2 – Last time we ended with showing you how to encrypt your thumb drive. Now we’ll resume and show you how to make using encryption a little less inconvenient.
• Top five Security #038; Privacy extensions for Firefox – Following on from last week, this is my top five security amp; privacy extensions for Firefox.
• Turn your thumb drive into your digital lifeboat Part 1 – This is a series showing you how you can load up a basic USB thumb drive with some practical tools which will ensure you can keep your data safe from theft and hard drive failure.
• Top 5 most useful Firefox extensions – If you’re not already using it, hopefully you’ll be aware of the Firefox web browser. One of it’s killer features is that you can add “extensions” to expand it’s functionality. For the next two weeks I’m going to post a list of extensions that I think you should use. This week, I’ll post up extensions I use that are just generally useful. Next week, I’ll post up extensions that are for your privacy and security.
• How to become an e-mail ninja – Part 3 – Okay this is due to a Google video I watched of a talk given by Merlin Mann, about “Inbox Zero (Google video)” (which I’ll show you at the end of this series), you can download the audio here (MP3 59Minutes 40MB). I’m not going to rehash the whole talk, but listening to this really changed the way I have looked at e-mail. (He talks a lot more about time management than I do).
• How to become an e-mail ninja – Part 2 – Picking up from where we left off last time. If you use POP mail and need to access old messages when you’re away from home, you can’t because it’s all stored inside your home computer!So, if you need to access your e-mail when you’re not at home, the alternative of web mail would seem to be the solution. However, if you want to have a home copy of your e-mail for back up purposes and for off-line access too, then web mail is no help.
• How to become an e-mail ninja – Part 1 – We all depend on e-mail these days, most of the world runs on it. It’s definitely something we all take for granted, although it’s a lot more complicated than most of us realise. This series of posts will cover the pro’s and cons of whether you should download it to your home computer or keep it in the cloud and also how to keep on top of your e-mail, and not let your e-mail get on top of you!Part 1 discusses the good and bad points of getting your mail downloaded to your home computer. Part 2 goes into more sophisticated methods that allow you to have your e-mail stored at home, but still accessible from anywhere. Part 3 then talks about how you process your incoming e-mail and keep your inbox from overflowing!

Okay folks, I know I’ve broken with my regular posting schedule, sorry!

However, I haven’t abandoned things; I’ve been busying myself with making some subtle changes to the looks of the site. This post is more for myself than anything, as a record of what I’ve done. Also, I’d like to thank my friend and server admin, Ryan, for suggesting most of the things I’ve done to the site.

Header - before

Header - after

Header

I’ve done two things to the header, and I’m very pleased with both.

First of all, I’ve created a search box (one less widget to put on the sidebar). I also created a custom background for the text box so that it fitted in with the theme design. The submit button looks like text, although it is actually an image of text. This is because no matter how I set the style of the basic button, I could not get rid of the edge shading effect. So instead I made some text in the same font as the page links, and used it as an image.

Secondly, I changed the RSS link. Before it was a simple line of text with an RSS icon. Although now, I have taken the Feedburner counter that was on my social networks widget and put that in place. Then also, I have replaced the standard RSS icon with one lovingly drawn by yours truely.

Custom social networking widgets

Sidebar

I have dropped several unnecessary widgets, including my free-form text boxes with the QR codes and campaign badges. I’ve added a collapsible archive widget, I wanted to have a collapsible category widget too, although I just could not find one that worked properly, shame!

My “social networking” (a simple Text WP widget) has gone back to the original version – a collection of favicons. The first time I had it like that, I eventually dropped it as I thought it too much work to keep maintained. I still feel that way although I developed a spreadsheet to help me manage all the lines of text. So now, I just enter any new social networks into the spreadsheet, and then copy-paste the final cell of the sheet into my text box.

After having such a massive traffic spike last week (1,432 visitors!), I thought I should put up a “most popular” widget (rather than just a recent posts widget). It took a lot of experimenting to find a plugin that worked the way I wanted it to. I ended up settling with a plugin called Recently Popular. I also modified my Twitter Widget to show my Twitter counter. With these changes, I didn’t loose the counters I had in my social networks widget, but instead distrobuted them around the page!

Finally, just to try and save on more space, I have reduced the line height and font size (1.1em & 90% respectively).

The great spike of January 10th 2009

Popularity

I didn’t finish reporting my traffic surge properly, but I just thought I’d show the spike before I let anymore time slip by. I’m dissappointed things have slipped back to normal, but there is a small improvement on my mean daily visitors, and I’m hoping to get writing more soon to pull more people in from search engines. (Chart created by Piwik.)

I’ll say now, if you’re not a Wordpress user this post will be of no interest to you!

I was recently trying to add images with captions to my blog, and I had a problem getting them to align how I wanted them to. A little research uncovered that a change which came with Wordpress 2.6 meant that a lot of themes had been broken when it came to aligning captioned images.

A little more research uncovered a solution. According to this WP support article, you need to add the following code to the styles.css file of your theme.

/*
The following is a fix for changes form WP 2.6 that broke a lot of themes.
Have had to fix some colours for this particular theme.
*/

.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 2px solid #000000;
text-align: center;
background-color: #292b2e;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
/* optional rounded corners for browsers that support it */
-moz-border-radius: 9px;
-khtml-border-radius: 9px;
-webkit-border-radius: 9px;
border-radius: 9px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

David’s links of the week December 19th through January 10th:

• Follow up – another Micro SDHC card. – David.R.Gilson#039;s review of Sandisk#039;s class 2 16GB Micro SDHC card.
• Review of Sandisk 8GB Micro SDHC Ultra card – David.R.Gilson#039;s review of Sandisk#039;s Class 6 8GB Micro SDHC memory card
• Review of Nokia E51 smartphone – David.R.Gilson#039;s review of Nokia#039;a E51 S60 smarphone
• AuthorHighlight – WordPress Plugin Repository – Author Highlight is a plugin that prints out a user-specified class attribute if the comment is made by the specified author. It is useful if you would like to apply a different style to comments made by yourself.
• WordPress-phpMyAdmin : silpstream -
• 30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics -
• Podcasting Toolbox: 70+ Podcasting Tools and Resources -
• 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles -
• 30+ Plugins for Wordpress Comments -
• 50+ Tools For The WordPress Admin -
• 50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia -
• Freelancers’ Toolbox – 30+ Online Freelance Resources -
• PDF Toolbox: 40+ Tools to Rip, Mix and Burn PDFs -
• A quantum leap in electrical energy storage – A company called EEStor have filed a patent for a quot;super capacitorquot;. 31 Farad capacity which can run at 3,500 volts.In small scale, it should be possible to charge a laptop or mobile phone on a domestic supply in 5 seconds and have two to three times as much energy stored, all in the same size as our current Li Ion batteries. Then since it#039;s a capacitor instead of an electrochemical cell, there#039;s no degradation between charge/discharge cycles.

  Solar cells, wind turbines and electric cars could also really benefit from this.

  I#039;ve written more at my blog

• Livemocha: Learn Languages Online – English, Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, 学会英语 -
• artofgregmartin.com v. xiv – This tutorial should step you through making a simple, yet realistic-looking planet using Adobe Photoshop 7, and ONLY Adobe Photoshop 7. We#039;re working small here, so keep in mind that the larger you work, the harder the planet will be to create (just a bit more work as size increases).

When you leave a comment on a blog, one of the tricky bits is keeping informed of repsonses to your contribution.

Well, I’m now giving you two options for doing this. If you’re the sort who likes to be fed everything via RSS news feeds, there is an RSS feed of all the comments on this blog, this feed is also accessible from the RSS icon in your address bar if you’re using an up to date web browser.

Alternatively, if you like updates being pushed to your e-mail inbox, then we can do that too. When you fill in the comment form, you’ll find a little tick box, as shown below: