USPS has a time machine?

Expected Delivery Date: January 12, 2011
Class: First-Class Mail®
Service(s): Certified Mail™
Return Receipt Electronic
Status: Arrival at Unit

Your item arrived at 5:26 am on January 14, 2011 in NEW YORK, NY 10019. The Postal Service expects to deliver the item on Wednesday, January 12, 2011. Information, if available, is updated periodically throughout the day. Please check again later.

WordPress batch upgrade

If you run a web server and have multiple installations of WordPress, upgrading them all is a pain.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could update a dozen WP installs at once? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could update the Akismet plugin at the same time? (WordPress releases independently of Akimset, and their subversion tags doesn’t track Akismet’s trunk).

Now you can. Inspired by Scot Hacker’s WordPress Mass Management Tools, I created wp-upgrade.

Usage

$ cd /path/to/wp-upgrade
$ sudo ./wp-upgrade.py 3.0.4

Configuration

You need to configure two files before starting:

  • sites.txt a tab-delimited file with information about the sites you’ll be upgrading (path, url, email address of owner, userid of owner)
  • wp-upgrade.txt an email with instructions to your users

GenerationX updated for Snow Leopard

When you work on your family tree — or genealogy project — you’ll work with GEDCOM files. Sites like Geni and ancestry.com can export (and sometimes) import these files.

There are a few Mac programs for editing GEDCOM files: Reunion ($100), Heredis ($70), MacFamilyTree ($50) and GEDitCOM II ($65).

These are varying degrees of nice, but overkill if you just need to read a file or two. A while ago, Chris Hagedorn wrote GenerationX, a free GEDCOM reader.

But Chris ceased development on GenerationX. He left two versions: 2.4.1 and a beta of 3.0. GenerationX was PowerPC-only and crashed on launch under Snow Leopard. The version 3 beta had some expiry code in it; it was set to expire in 2006.

I downloaded a copy of the GenerationX source, fixed a bunch of the errors and warnings and put my fork on GitHub. It looks like this:

It’s definitely beta quality. Hopefully someone who’s a solid Cocoa engineer will fork the project and take it over.

Download GenerationX 3.0 beta. This is a universal binary that runs on Snow Leopard.