Tag Archives: development

More Lined Notepads for Livescribe?

I’ve already released 4 50 page notepads of lined notepads for Livescribe. Download: https://rohankapoor.com/projects/livescribe/lined-notepads-1-4/ . This gives a total of 200 unique printable usable pages before one has to archive to use them again. I’ve had several requests from people for more lined notepads. I have considered making them for my own use as well. I decided it would be best to take a public poll and see how many people actually would find additional lined notepads useful. If more people want them than not, I will be quite happy to create and license another 2 for now. If/when more are needed, they can be added as well. I have my original templates for the lined notepads so with a few modifications to the vector graphics files and a new paper project with the SDK, it will be fairly simple to generate the needed notepads.

My other projects for the Livescribe Smartpens are available here.

Thanks for sharing your opinion!

Do you want more lined notepads for Livescribe?

Yes (96%, 239 Votes)
No (4%, 10 Votes)

Total Voters: 249

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EDIT 8/22/11 @ 12:18 PM EST: The poll has been closed for a while and I have released four more notepads. All are downloadable from here: https://rohankapoor.com/projects/livescribe/custom-paper-deployment-tool/

Release: Lined Notepads for Livescribe

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I just got around to uploading my lined notepads for Livescribe’s Smartpens. They are 50 pages a piece and there are four of them. The plan is to release two more of them soon. They are deployed via the standard deployment process (which I have outlined numerous times).

Instructions and Downloads are available: https://rohankapoor.com/projects/livescribe/lined-notepads-1-4/

Post a comment if you have any questions or concerns!

What I Like (And Dislike) About WordPress 3.0

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A couple of weeks ago WordPress (the software that powers this site), popped up a notification that version 3.0 Thelonius was ready to download and install. I held off on the upgrade for a while because of many problems I have had upgrading from version to version with WordPress. I have to admit though I was very pleasantly surprised with the ease of the installation. I simply hit upgrade, entered my ftp information and waited for it to think. A little less than a minute later, I was running WordPress 3.0. It was absolutely amazing, there were no problems, it just worked. This was a great change from version upgrades before, many times they have broken compatibility with lots of plugins (WordPress 2.8 for example) and broken the theme. This time, all of my plugins worked, the theme worked and there was absolutely nothing that needed changing at all. What I found incredible is that they were able to combine WordPress Multiple User directly into WordPress 3.0. On my one internal testing site (on localhost), I was able to update directly from WPMU to WP 3.0 also with no problems.

WordPress 3.0 ships with a new theme called TwentyTen. Kubrick (which has been the default theme for a while) has finally been replaced with something that is fully compliant with Web 2.0 standards and looks amazing. The only reason that I’m not using it myself is because while it is an amazing theme, it isn’t “techie” enough for my liking. It’s still a great theme, but I probably won’t be using it, at least not for this site.

However, as amazing as WordPress 3.0 is; it still (like everything) has it shortcomings. Namely compatibility with BuddyPress 1.2.4.1. While the basic install of BuddyPress is still as easy as ever, the combination with bbPress is broken again. Now attempting to enable the bbPress portion of BuddyPress results in a bb-config.php being created, no database tables being created, and an overall total mess. Basically the forums function is completely broken and this makes a large portion of BuddyPress and by extension WordPress useless. This is a rather large bug and whether it is with WordPress 3.0, BuddyPress 1.2.4.1 or with the version of bbPress included in the BuddyPress install, it needs to be found and fixed quickly.

Automattic is rather good at putting out bugfixes and I’m sure that once they know about it, they and the full team of Open Source Developers behind WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress will patch this bug and everything will be working again. It will just take a little bit (more) time!

Why I Switched Back to Intense Debate for Comment Management

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Previously, I wrote Why Intense Debate Still Isn’t Ready for WordPress Use! Since then, my view on Intense Debate has changed. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been a big fan of Automattic’s attempts to combine user accounts between various services allowing us as blog holders to simplify the number of logins we need to remember. Nearly two months back, Intense Debate attempted to add themselves to the Autommatic “account combined” list.

It had mixed success because while it allowed those of us with WordPress.com accounts to comment through Intense Debate, we still had two profiles. There was an Intense Debate profile and a WordPress.com profile. This created confusion because we now had two accounts instead of just the one that we were supposed to. The intentions were to fix this soon, but it still hasn’t happened. Here’s why it affected me:

I decided to try out Intense Debate myself to see if it would fit the needs of this site. I ended up creating a new Intense Debate account, not realizing that I could just sign on with my WordPress.com login and password. I linked this site to and my comments synced perfectly with Intense Debate. Then of course, I read this post and decided that I wanted my Intense Debate profile to be the same as my WordPress.com one. Of course, I deleted my Intense Debate account and then reset the plugin. I tried to connect it to my “new” account but of course, it wouldn’t let me do that. It seems that you need to disconnect your WordPress blog from Intense Debate before deleting or switching accounts. Now I’m stuck, without Intense Debate. My hope is, that when the merger goes through properly, they will realize that my orphaned blog belongs to my WordPress.com account and attach the two together. That would save a lot of hassle for all of us who don’t read directions properly before beginning.

Since then, Intense Debate support have looked into my accounts and have combined the two of them under my wordpress.com account and I no longer have two accounts, 🙂 They believe that all other accounts should be combined by the end of the year, which with the volume of accounts they have is understandable.

So, here I am: running Intense Debate again except this time with only 1 account!

Release: Printable Graphpads for Livescribe!

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Several months ago, I received Livescribe’s Pulse Smartpen as a birthday present. At the time, I was amazed by the features and the concept of such a device. It soon began to play an integral role in my technological life and now I really would be lost without it. You can see my full review (after months of using it) here. As I have mentioned on the official Livescribe Forums several times, the only thing that the Pulse Smartpen lacks is graph paper. Now I’m not the only one that has noticed this and Livescribe has been promising to release dot paper with grid lines on it at some point. Unfortunately, they’ve been saying that for a little over a year now. As I’m sure most of you know already, when Livescribe says something, it usually takes them some time to actually do it. Personally, I’m not a big fan of waiting for someone else to do something when it’s relatively easy (though inconvenient) to do it on my own. Of course, Livescribe has an SDK. However, the SDK is only downloadable to developers. No problem, to become an “official developer,” you just need to fill out a registration form and then download the SDK. Using the SDK, I eventually managed to create my first paper project for the smartpen. I of course dubbed it: Quarter Inch Printable Graphpad 1. However, the only problem with the current SDK is that it’s not currently possible to script page number generation. This is supposedly a feature that will be released in the long awaited Desktop SDK. Coincidently, Livescribe plans to release this by the end of quarter 2, 2010. To the end user this simply means that it will take a slightly longer time to input the pages to Livescribe Desktop. I should add that uploading custom pages currently only works with Livescribe Desktop for Windows. It is currently incompatible with Livescribe Desktop for Macintosh.

I’ve successfully created four of these graphpads (all with quarter inch graph paper as a template) and all of them have basic paper replay controls. Each of these graphpads is 25 pages long, leaving you with 100 unique pages total. However, I haven’t licensed the fourth graphpad as I haven’t had a need for it (yet) myself. I would be willing to license and release it if people request it because they need it. Chances are, at some point I will end up needing it myself and will release it at that time.

If you are interested in downloading and deploying these graphpads, I recommend that you head over to the download page, where you can find all of the necessary links and instructions.

Why Intense Debate Still Isn’t Ready For WordPress Use!

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Intense Debate is definitely one of the best debate/comment systems out there. There’s no question of that here! Automattic has done a brilliant job with Intense Debate but it still needs a lot of work. I love the fact that one Intense Debate account allows you to login to many different sites to post comments because of their diverse and widespread plugins for many different platforms. It certainly is easier to users and to webmasters because they don’t have to worry about pruning for spam and checking on their spam plugins. Sure, a webmaster still needs to look into those but with Intense Debate, the pruning is all handled by them and not by you. The time needed to clean up the spam is greatly reduced.

I for one was very excited when Intense Debate announced WordPress.com Sign In. I don’t know if you have noticed but Automattic has slowly been implementing that across all of their platforms. However, across their other platforms, they have also included account mergers, merging accounts between services with the WordPress.com account with identical email addresses. That is where they really shine. I’ve had a WordPress.com account for a while, because I needed the API Key for Akismet. I’ve also had a Gravatar because I love not having to set my avatar up on every site I start up. Late last year, they merged the databases of Gravatar with WordPress.com and my two accounts became connected. There was no longer a disconnect.

However, the Intense Debate implementation failed in this context. Account Mergers are not possible at this time. The Intense Debate Team said:

If you already have both IntenseDebate and WordPress.com accounts, don’t worry – we will be merging your accounts in the next phase of our integration, so keep commenting!

That’s good, it means that integration is coming but it’s still not quite ready for mainstream use. Let me give you my own story.

I decided to try out Intense Debate myself to see if it would fit the needs of this site. I ended up creating a new Intense Debate account, not realizing that I could just sign on with my WordPress.com login and password. I linked this site to and my comments synced perfectly with Intense Debate. Then of course, I read this post and decided that I wanted my Intense Debate profile to be the same as my WordPress.com one. Of course, I deleted my Intense Debate account and then reset the plugin. I tried to connect it to my “new” account but of course, it wouldn’t let me do that. It seems that you need to disconnect your WordPress blog from Intense Debate before deleting or switching accounts. Now I’m stuck, without Intense Debate. My hope is, that when the merger goes through properly, they will realize that my orphaned blog belongs to my WordPress.com account and attach the two together. That would save a lot of hassle for all of us who don’t read directions properly before beginning.

Therefore Intense Debate isn’t quite ready for WordPress use. It’s very close and it’s getting closer, but there is still a short ways to go. Once they manage to complete the merger, I for one will be quite pleased with them. I’m just hoping the “next phase of [their] integration” happens soon!

Domain Change…

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When I first started this blog, I owned the domain http://rohan-kapoor.com. I wanted the domain https://rohankapoor.com but unfortunately for me (at the time) the domain was owned by another Rohan Kapoor who co-incidently wasn’t using it for anything. Strangely enough, when I checked the whois records last June, I surprising found that the domain https://rohankapoor.com was available! I bought it at that time and have since been redirecting it to http://rohan-kapoor.com. Some of you may have noticed that now the exact opposite has happened. Instead I’m now redirecting from http://rohan-kapoor.com to https://rohankapoor.com. My reasoning behind that change was that the domain https://rohankapoor.com looks much better than the same domain with a dash in it. It also makes it easier to find according to many of my friends. Therefore to make it easier for friends and colleagues to find me online, I decided to move my blog over to https://rohankapoor.com. On the webserver end, this is actually so easy it’s almost a joke! As I’m running Domain Mapping to map the blog to the domain, I just simply removed the dash that the domain was mapped to and it just works! I’ve requested google to make the needed changes on their end to move the site over within their database. According to Google’s Webmaster Tools, this process is likely to take 3 months to get completed! Additionally, I need to change out the links on many of the sites I’ve worked on to say https://rohankapoor.com instead of the old address. There should be no problem contacting me because of the domain change as the two email addresses and domains are run seamlessly through Google’s Apps Service! My plan is to keep everything on https://rohankapoor.com for now!

In regards to the many subdomains of http://rohan-kapoor.com, currently they are going to stay at http://rohan-kapoor.com though at some point I will transition them over to https://rohankapoor.com. The old addresses will be seamlessly redirected with 301 Redirects which should cause no problems to the end users!

It’s good to finally be moving everything to the https://rohankapoor.com domain name! It seems more professional, you know?

Released bbPress Favicon

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I just released bbPress Favicon the companion plugin to WordPress/MU Favicon. It does exactly the same thing WordPress/MU Favicon does except does it for the bbPress sitewide and the bbPress admin pages. You can see the Changelog for those that are interested!

—————————- Changelog: —————————-

1.0

First Release
Working with 1.x

Added A Page for WordPress/MU Favicon

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After being told off by mercime for not having a page for WordPress/MU Favicon, I finally got around to pulling it’s page out of Drafts and updating it to show the latest information regarding version 1.1. 🙂

It appears that it took me long enough to pull it together, but hey, I was busy. Anways better late then never.

The homepage for WordPress/MU Favicon is here.

And for anyone interested, here is the changelog:

—————————- Changelog: —————————-

1.1

readme.txt fixed

1.0

First Release
Working with 2.8.4

New bbPress Admin Updated… Again!

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I released version 3.0 of New bbPress Admin today! This version is mainly a bugfix release with no new functionality. You can see the changelog for more details.

—————————- Changelog: —————————-

3.0

Successfully stops the Login/Logout Problem
Successfully stops the Headers Being Sent Problem
As Far As I Can Tell, It Is A Bug Free Release
Works with WP/WPMU 2.8.x and bbPress 1.x

2.1 Beta

Attempts to solve the Login/Logout Problem
Attempst to solve the headers Being Sent Problem

2.0

Second Version of bbPress Admin. It has been adapted to have a backend interface to set the forums directory.
Looks Neater and is much easier to use.
Works with WP/WPMU 2.8.2 and bbPress 1.0.1

1.0

First Version of bbPress Admin. It is very simple and rudimentary at this point.
Working with WP/WPMU 2.8.1 and bbPress 1.0.1

You can view the plugin page here. Or download directly from the WordPress Plugin Repository here.

Currently version 3.0 is the most stable version with no bugs that I know of!

Enjoy 🙂