CategoryTechnology

WordPress 3.3 White Editor

You’ve rushed ahead and upgraded to WP3.3 and all looks well. All except that the menus don’t work and when you try to edit a post, everything appears to be gone. You notice that your writing is there, but that it is white text on a white background (and there are not buttons and you cannot get out of Visual mode). For me at least this was the solution: (1) clear your cache (2) install the Hotfix 0.8 (currently labeled development version) plugin from here.

On my end, I scoured the forum, followed the official word, cleared my cache, tried Hotfix 0.7, re-upgraded, killed all my themes and plugins, re-upgraded manually, read post after post telling people to just read the FAQ and rejoice. There was no joy in any of that for me. Glory be for the good fellow over at the WordPress Genius Bar, for the divine led me to his post: WordPress 3.3 Upgrade Problem: Toolbar Disappears in Page/Post Editor.

What a long road. Overall, you should just stay where you are until 3.3.1 pops out. If you weren’t so lucky, I hope this helps.

iCloud & Contacts Disappear

Português: iCloud para iOS, Mac e Windows
Image via Wikipedia

I decided to do a mass cleanup of my contacts. Being prudent, I made a backup before, and after, using the “Address Book Archive” option as we’ve been told. Then, all of the contacts disappeared. Fine, no problem, I restored from the backup. Everything looked good but a few seconds later everything was gone again. Fine, I restored from a Time Machine backup. Things went just as badly. I frantically searched for a solution and was relieved to find a post from Richard L. on MacRumours. It was an horrific experience for us to have to share. I’m posting the steps I was forced into due to this obvious near fatal bug from our dearest Apple.

1. Completely sign out of iCloud.
2. If there are somehow any remnants of your contacts in Address Book, delete them.
3. Import your “Address Book Archive File” that didn’t work for long before.
4. Make any edits and clean things up. (some were obscenely mis-alphabetized – a likely corrupted cause of the problem in the first place)
5. Drag each address book entry out of AB individually to a folder somewhere.
6. Delete everything in AB.
7. Drag the mess of vCards back into AB.
8. Log back into iCloud. (You will notice you still have contacts – that don’t sync)
9. Turn off Contacts sync in the iCloud pref pane, keeping your local contacts.
10. Turn it back on. It will kindly “merge” your contacts with iCloud.

At this point you should have a complete Address Book on your mac as well as the nicely synced data on your mac/phone/pad/pod.

Oh, Apple! It “just works,” until it doesn’t. Hopefully those good folks will fix this quite traumatic situation soon.

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Siri-ously?

I understand that Siri is still in beta, but it can still be extremely irritating how it interprets some things so oddly. I asked “How far is it from Singapore to Amsterdam” with Siri just insisting that it “cannot give directions in Singapore.” I’m sure everyone knows already, but it’s often best to prefix whatever you want to ask with “Wolfram” to increase your chances of getting some sort of sensible response. I suppose this would be much less important in the US … and have anecdotally heard that some Australians are having trouble getting the word “wolfram” itself to be recognized. <Giggle>

Before it’s suggested that SingTel has def!nd out now as a localized Siri, def!nd works fine to search for local things, but is and never was intended to be a drop-in Siri replacement despite what some deluded reporters like to put in their headlines.