Last Monday, I got a mail from Google. This was a surprise for me since I had never got any ordinary mail from them before. I only got charged by Google on my mother’s credit card for using Adwords 4 years ago. It looks like Google Adsense is sending out Google Adsense Personal Identification Number (PIN) to Adsense publishers. This is to ensure payment for your account.

I don’t really consider myself as a publisher yet. I do write on my blogs but most of the stuff I write is kind of informal. I’m trimming down my blogs and for now I only focus on this blog. You can only write so much in the hours you have in your life. Anyway, I have a long way to go before I can ask for a payout from Google Adsense. Still, it is good to know that Google hasn’t forgotten the old fashion standard snail mail.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been fiddling with a lot of stuff on Wordpress. It seems like the mechanical stuff I’ve learned really helped me a lot in determining how to fix something. Recently I’ve stumbled upon a lot of problem regarding the access to the Wordpress login. One of them is the lost and forgotten username and password. If you handle or own a lot of your self hosted Wordpress blogs, you might come across this accessing difficulties once in a while and I have a solution for that.

To be able to recover your Wordpress login, here is two things you need to know before you even attempt to perform this recovering task:

• You must have the master login to your webhosting or at least must be able to access phpMyAdmin.
• You must know how to backup your Wordpress MySQL blog database.

If you don’t know how to deal with the above list, try Google them or download WAMP, XAMPP or WOS and fiddle around with them on your Localhost before you proceed on your live blog. Okay, let’s move on. Download your Wordpress MySQL database in .sql format (you can download it on whatever format you want but I like to stick with .sql). Use your favourite text editor. I use my Dreamweaver to do the job.

After you open the sql file, don’t bother about reading all the mumbo jumbo codes unless you like to. Use your Search and Replace function and search for ‘user_login’. This is very useful if your WP SQL file is big. I’ll give you a peek of how the codes look like:

As you can see, I’ve colour coded the values that is involved and how it is related. The code above is an example of a multi-user wordpress blog. If you only have one user, there will be only one user information. Once you know what to edit, get rid of those old password circled in red. Wordpress login uses MD5 to jumble the password so that it is not easily hacked. We now use md5 Hash Generator to get a new code for our new password.

Once we have replaced the new password generated by the md5 Hash Generator, it’s now time to upload the database back to it’s place. Make sure you have make a back up before you do this or else don’t blame me if something goes wrong. Test your Wordpress blog and see if it runs okay or not. After you done that, try and access your Wordpress Admin area and if that doesn’t work, maybe you’ve changed the wrong user login or keep on trying. There are a lot of other stuff you can do if you know how to edit your Wordpress MySQL database. I’ll write about it when I’m in the mood. If you need help, place your questions on my comment box below and I’ll see what I can help.

Further reading: Wordpress FAQ

Comparing my old work place/desk and now my new work desk:

I would have to say, I love my new work desk even more. My work computer is a Pentium 4 2GHz with 512MB RAM running on a Windows XP Pro. The keyboard and mouse is cordless and I now have a wide 21 inches LCD monitor and another 14 inches CRT monitor on the side. I used to work with a laptop so I was never used to have a dual monitor. It took a few hours before I get comfortable using 2 monitors in front of me. It does make my tasks easier since I have more space to work.

By the way, Master Yoda on top of the CRT monitor is training me to be a Wordpress Jedi since I’ve been fiddling around Wordpress themes and plugins for the past 3 weeks already. I hope to become a master very soon..

When I first started my new job last 28 February, my new office had some sort of power failure and all the PC had to be shut down. It was Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) doing their routine job of maintenance. Today, it was my house turn to have those power maintenance. I didn’t realize this until my brother sms me and told me the power was out from like 10am. I thought it could be temporary. Unfortunately I was wrong, it was still out when I got home and all my neighbours are getting uncomfortable since it was getting dark.

At 8pm, I had to do something and without electricity, there was nothing I could do except for staring at the candle. It was hot and sleeping wasn’t going to do it because without any air flow, I would sweat like crazy and that’s not quality sleep. I then decided to go to my aunt’s house down in Kota Damansara thus this blog post was type.

I just couldn’t believe TNB doesn’t give any notice to the neighbourhood affected. I saw a couple of generator trucks but they were for the condominium nearby and not for the terrace house where I live. It was just sucks. I hope this black out would never occur again.