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Here’s a great close-up of laser tatoo removal in about 5 minutes!

60% of people with tattoos would like to have at least one removed. South Coast MedSpa uses the most advanced lasers in the industry. For more information or to book an… More» appointment go to www.southcoastmedspa.com or call 949-650-7267. individual patient results may vary

via metacafe

Well, since I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, I’ve had to let go of Ultimate Tag Warrior. Actually, I thought Ultimate Tag Warrior was working until today, when I found out every URL such as http://zedomax.com/tag/lasers, was giving me a 404 error.

Well, being an old school I am, I did even try to downgrade back to my favorite Wordpress 2.2.3, which results in catastrophic failure with the wp-categories… Damn it!

So I did look through the internet and basically Wordpress 2.5 has a built-in function to let you import Ultimate Tag Warrior tags.

Even though it should have gone smoothly, I did encounter LOTS of problems as the built-in function was very basic and did not support importing of 47,000 tags, which is what this site has.

The first problem I had was that I keep getting the following message:

Done! 13331 tags were read.
Reading UTW Post Tags…
Done! 45824 tags to post relationships were read.
Adding Tags to Posts…
Done! 0 tags were added!

Now, as you can see everything worked until the last line, “Done! 0 tags were added!”. I was so furious to know why it wasn’t working, so I even downgraded to Wordpress 2.3.1-RC, which others were saying that it worked.

Now when I tried to import, I did get this error message:

WordPress database error: [Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes]

This one is easy, this simply means your MySQL server is not set to handle large amount of data.

So I did change the max_allowed_packet size to 1 gigabyte like this by add this line:

set-variable = max_allowed_packet=1024M

(Yes, 1 gig should do the job I thought…)

Well, it turns out that after this change, I don’t get the “0 tags were added” message, but the screen “hangs” at the last step of the import screen…

As a more of a good hacker than a developer I am, I finally decided it was time to hack the Wordpress itself.

When I looked into the import php file, utw.php which is under wp-admin/import directory of your Wordpress blog.

It turns out that the import program is very basic at most and the programmer didn’t even consider large chunks of data.

So instead of doing 1 MySQL query, I changed it so it only fetches 100 data bits at a time.

If you are having problems like me with a large tag database, you can change the following function in utw.php like this:

function tag2post ( ) {

// get the tags and posts we imported in the last 2 steps
$tags = get_option(’utwimp_tags’);
$posts = get_option(’utwimp_posts’);

global $wpdb;
$startvalue=0;
$endvalue=1000;
$ct=$startvalue;

$tags_added = 0;
while($ct<$endvalue) {

$posts_query = “SELECT tag_id, post_id FROM ” . $wpdb->prefix . “post2tag”.” LIMIT “.$ct.”,100″;
$posts = $wpdb->get_results($posts_query);

if($posts) {
// null out our results

// loop through each post and add its tags to the db
foreach ( $posts as $this_post ) {

$the_post = (int) $this_post->post_id;
$the_tag = (int) $this_post->tag_id;

// what’s the tag name for that id?
$the_tag = $tags[$the_tag];

// screw it, just try to add the tag
wp_add_post_tags($the_post, $the_tag);
$tags_added++;
echo “Num: “.$tags_added.” - “.$the_tag.”<br />”;

}

}
$ct=$ct+100;
sleep(0.1);
}
echo “HACKED by Max Lee from http://zedomax.com yey!”;

// that’s it, all posts should be linked to their tags properly, pending any errors we just spit out!
return $tags_added;

}

Download my UTW.php here (rename utw.txt as utw.php)

Now, my recommendation is to run the Step 3 of the UTW import by taking 2000 tags at a time. You can change the value of $startvalue and $endvalue to control the range of your imports.

FInally, I did get all my precious tags imported, now you can install the Tag Suggest Thing and some other cool stuff from the UTW.

Phew, that was a long 4 hours of hacking Wordpress. Although I am very impressed at the new Wordpress 2.5, functions like the Ultimate Tag Warrior import could be improved dramatically through use of smarter programming and AJAX.

What I do recommend that Wordpress developers do is use AJAX to fetch at most 1000 tags at a time and then update the screen and the database to protect again freezing or users having to re-configure their MySQL server.

I also found out that if your PHP setttings for max_execution_time is low, (mine was at 10 seconds), this can be a problem as the import process takes longer than 10 seconds for big databases.

So change it like this in your /etc/php.ini file:

max_execution_time = 90 ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 95 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 128M

Then you can change it back after import.

Now, I’ve outlined all the possible problems you can have while importing your “large” number of tags.

For blogs with little or less than 2000 tags, the default Wordpress importer shouldn’t be a problem but for people like me with over 10,000 tags, this is a big problem but I am sure Wordpress developers will update it in the future. Check me out as I tried to get help from Wordpress Forum, but I did figure it out eventually myself.

Here’s a cool spy gadget you can get which comes with built-in webcam and MP3 plus the ability to spy on your family. Well…not exactly spying but you can use it security I guess… Preorder one at Amazon.

Nikko and Erector just launched the Spykee Spy Robot, a Johnny-5-esque little fellow that recharges itself and includes a webcam and MP3 player all in a clever little package.

It costs about $299 and let’s you watch your family remotely, ensuring that your domicile will be safe from robo-phobic burglers. It reacts to motion so when someone pops in for a visit the SpyKee can email their picture to you and then burn their face off with huge fiery lasers.

via crunchgear

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Wow, one day we will be able to carry our cellphones with Word documents, presentations, and then we goto the meeting with this guy.

Unlike traditional projectors, the Pico Projector “prototype uses red, green, and blue lasers and a digital micromirror array (ultraminiaturized DLP technology) to pump out a bright picture.” Video after the break. Click here for additional images.

via techeblog

Here’s my top 10 reasons why you need blog(s) if you want to succeed online:

1. Blogs can be updated hourly, daily, or any time you want to update your site.
2. Each post on a Blog has tags in comparison
3. Target keywords for your products. (For example, you can make a new post with title, description, and tags targeted at your keywords such as “iphone hacks”)
4. Blogs are the next communication medium on the internet.
5. It’s never too late to make a blog
6. You can give out stuff for free that you get for free. (e.g. Our lasers were provided free from DragonLasers and we are giving them out FREE!)
7. There are so many pages in a blog including the index page, each individual posts, each individual catalogs, and each invidual tags. Blogs are keyword magnets to Google’s SEO.
8. Blogging is fun.
9. Bloggers rule.
10. A lot of hollywood stars have blogs…(you can too!)
11. Get digged and get some traffic to your site…

Hey, we are back on a super-fast server from Cari.net. We had to move to a quad CPU dedicated server due to traffic and slow load times. Aplus.net didn’t have any faster CPU than dual-core so we had to move. Anyways, I just got my cool green dragon laser from Dragon Lasers last week. I will shoot a video soon to show it off. (And yeah, we are giving them some free ads for the free sample!) Thanks Frank for the $400 green laser! I’ve been very busy pointing it at the sky and other things. It’s really cool, the green laser beam can be seen at night!

On the side note, this is the 4th time we’ve moved our servers. Next time, we will probably have to start making some server farms which would be kinda hairy…

Blip video Link

Bathsheba Grossman explains to us the 3D sculptures, sugar sculptures, and the sculptures made with lasers at the Maker Faire!

These are priceless…

via