At CES, ION has announced a dream come true. I thought the original iCade was the answer to this dream, but the iCade Jr. proves me wrong. As a kid, I saved for months to but a miniature arcade cabinet game. The one I bought was Frogger. At the time, it cost $50. That was quite a lot for me to save. Later, I was able to get a second cabinet from a garage sale for something like $5 or $10. That one was Pac-Man. I enjoyed those things at the time, but of course they fell short of what I wanted in my mind, which was the arcade game as I knew it, but small and in my bedroom with my other toys.

Now, the iCade Jr. is exactly that, and even better being smaller than the original concept. I’ve played with the original iCade and it was a smooth experience, though setting up the games can be tiresome on the Atari app. In that app, you need to tell each game if the iPad is horizontal or vertical separately. Seems like something they should have been able to fix. Anyhow, I can’t wait till this thing comes out. I need this on my desk to distract me from programming!

I originally saw this on MacRumors.com where the above photo comes from their CES coverage.

I have chosen a less dramatic title for my post than Business Inside did for theirs, but the talk is quite good and the ideas quite interesting. Roger McNamee is an investor and a musician. He seems to actually like technology and wants to see good uses of technology. Business Insider decided to highlight the quote “social is dead” in their title, but the talk is not much around that. His meaning of “social is dead” is that it is expected and maturing rapidly and thus new social start-ups are likely a waste. His suggestion is to focus efforts on HTML5 based experiences that are at least as good as what you can do on an iPad app. You can see his talk below.

I’m sorry to say that to date I have not been able to make WP-United work with WordPress 3 series. I haven’t been able to spend much time on it so I do not think it is impossible, but it is not a trivial fix if a solution exists. I’ve been working on other projects here and will start posting on those things as time allows. I will try and get back to WP-United, but it is looking like it will be a while before I can.

For those who haven’t tried WP-United 0.9, know it is very rough around the edges. The install instructions are incomplete and the only way to get it is from a source code repository. That being said, there is some promise. The WordPress plugins install on WordPress 3.1 without issue and things seem like they will work. I say seem because I did not have success getting it all working correctly yet. I stumbled on my install a couple of times and ended up with a problem I couldn’t diagnose and so I dropped it and removed the install. I will try again soon.

Part of the problem with 0.9 is its use of Flash in the admin to do some of the updates. It’s not very transparent what is going on so in my case the error I was getting could not be diagnosed. If I have success with my next install, I will detail the steps here.

Not much to say just yet. I have tried the same solution others have mentioned and got the same results. I prefixed all the colliding function names with wpu_ and now the template integration works and the user integration doesn’t. I will continue to look into the problem, but so far all I can do is concur with others’ findings.

It appears I am not the only one having problems with WP-United after updating to WordPress 3.1. There is a forum discussion on this issues and the same solution is proposed as I would have attempted. The proposed solution was to change the function definition in WP-United to a different name, as the error indicates a function naming collision. According to the forum, this allows template integration to work but user integration fails. I’m not sure that the comments integration would work in this case, so I don’t think this is a viable option. Time to look at other possibilities.

Here is another blog with the same problem and solution.

In previous posts here, I went over the process of making WordPress Multisite work on separate domains. This was necessary because WordPress Multisite is designed to work on subdomains instead of domains. Well, over at SitePoint they have a blog post detailing a different approach. I haven’t tested this other approach yet, which uses the domain mapping plugin. It should be a better solution as it does not involve hacking the core like the solution I detailed before.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out why NextGEN Gallery stopped working for us on model160.com and I finally have my answer. First I should note the reason it took so long to get to this conclusion. I am not the only one working on the site. There are two other people who are making changes and installing plugins. Because of this, I don’t know when some things are installed. Normally, if something is working, then a plugin is installed and that thing stops working, you blame the new plugin. My problem is, I didn’t know what was a new plugin.

Today I took the proper course of action and deactivated all the plugins and check. Indeed, NextGEN worked when only it was active. Obviously another plugin was causing the problem. In the end, there were two specific plugins that we were using that both cause problems for NextGEN. They were SFC – Like Button and SFC – Share Button. SFC here stands for Simple Facebook Connect. We were only using two other SFC plugins (beside SFC – Base) and they don’t have issues. SCF – Activity Feed Widget and SFC – Publish both work fine with NextGEN. I can’t say for the other SFC plugins, but be aware there are issues.