All garments for kids are always available only in very bright, vivid or pastel colours. The only shop that sells pure white and black garments is LIFEbaby in Singapore.

The garments are refreshingly different from the mass; how about a black baby t-shirt with image of Mao Zedong? Their signature pieces promote made-in-Asia, designed-by-Asians attitude, and provide a real choice for parents that care about stylish clothes for their little people.

Don’t get me wrong, the clothes are also cute, but in a different way. Check out by yourself. The garments are exporeted to several countries in the world. Enquire from the store.

www.lifebaby.com, #04-20 Ngee Ann City, 391 Orchard Road & #03-34 Raffles City Shopping Center, 252 North Bridge Road, enquiry@lifebaby.com

Noticed anything strange here in journal? No? Good!

I just finalised updating to WordPress 1.5. The process was partially smooth, but as I had hacked the original WP and some plug-ins for better layout or additional features, I had to port those changes one by one.

The updating process (in case you’re interested) was the following:

1. Backup the whole database with mysqldump.
2. Edit the resulting file to change the database.
3. Create new database and provide enough rights to relevant MySQL users.
4. Pump the data in the backup to the new database.
5. Install WordPress 1.5 to some location.
6. Fix the config to point to the correct database.
7. Run upgrade script provided by WordPress.
8. Change the blog URL manually from the database. Without this fix, the admin pages would redirect to the old blog.

Now we have one running blog in the old location, seen by all visitors and another blog that is used to get things right before publishing.

1. Create new theme.
2. Copy layout files to the new theme and activate it.
3. See the results and compare to the old blog.
4. Fix an issue and go back to the previous step. Fortunately, I had marked my changes to the old source — it was relatively easy to grep them and then port them to the new code. Some changes were no longer needed, for example, the calendar has been fixed to work with Finnish weekday style.
5. Install plugins and activate them. Add own code to the Spaminator. Some ideas were already implemented, so only 2/3 had to be ported.
6. Change external files that use the blog database. Test them.
7. Copy comment form layout and functionality from the old code. Change the name of the wp-comments-post.php file.
8. Find a bug in Textile JavaScript and fix it.
9. Test that everything works.

The new blog is running as an exact replica of the old one. It was time for the switch.

1. Move image directory from old blog to new one.
2. Configure new blogs URLs to point to the correct location.
3. Rename old blog directory.
4. Rename new blog directory.
5. Test that everything is still okay.

Easy, isn’t it?

By the way — please inform me, if you find anything out of ordinary.

Singapore is the best place I’ve ever been for buying electronics. The most convenient venue for purchasing audio-visual gadgets is Sim Lim Square. All the newest and fanciest stuff outside Japan (and thus interconnecting with the rest of your stuff) are available here, with several different prices.

Prepare for hard haggling and deals with several acts: arguing, pondering alternatives, arguing, walking out, coming back, setting price, more arguing and finally finding the suitable price. Check the base price first from Best Denki or some other store that shows the prices and offers no opportunity for settling the price.

Remember that some stores will put an extra charge for buying with a credit card. Try to get rid of it with hard negotiations and acts of desperation. Make sure that you get all required guarantee slips and GST forms to claim the taxes.

Sim Lim Square is not reachable by the MRT, so its easiest to take a taxi.

Sim Lim Square, 1 Rochor Canal Road, Singapore

If you’re from the UK, you’re most probably familiar with the Borders bookstore chain. They have outlets also in Singapore. The most conveniently located store is on the Orchard Road, near the Orchard Road MRT station.

The selection consists of books and music. All the major needs are catered here, but the selection can be quite narrow for certain specialised topics. The English literature section is excellent and the arts are quite well covered, but you’d better check Books Kunikinoya, too. The store has a cafe that is a nice place to study the books bought.

Borders, Wheelock Place, 501 Orchard Road, Singapore

Nomadig.com has been attacked with trackback spamming. The blogosphere got the volume of comment spam apparently down, as spammers are moving to the next targets.

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t handle trackbacks with exactly same mechanism as commetns and thus Spaminator cannot be used. I searched for solutions for this problem by surfing the Net and found a couple of new plug-ins to stop spamming:

• Moderate Pingbacks — forces pingbacks into moderation queue.
• Moderate Trackbacks — forces trackbacks into moderation queue, too.

Both of these plug-ins are written by Nick Nomrik, kudos to him.

The only problem is that I’ve to manually moderate ping/trackbacks, but as I haven’t seen much of them, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Singapore is filled with cafés of different coffee chains. As Starbucks are known by most of the readers of Nomadig.com, let’s pay attention to one of the local competitors: The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf — a monster name for such a simple café.

There are several joints of this popular chain around the island, but the best location that I’m aware of is just next to the Singapore River on Boat Quay. Order your standard cappucino or some cooled drink from inside and sip it on the patio while watching lazily the ever so busy river cruise boats on the water.

The experience doesn’t differ from Starbucks. WLAN from StarHub is a nice perk.

The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, 82 Boat Quay, Singapore, +65 6536 4355

Apple has a branded outlet in Wheelock Place mall. You can buy some Apple merchandise, such as iPODs, from any bigger vendor in generic IT malls, but this store has the whole repertoure from Apple.

The store is surprisingly small, busy and loudy. All the stuff is crammed into a miniscule space that is filled with people trying out the toys. Unlike in Apple flagship stores, there are no experts available and software selection is limited.

Singapore uses US keyboard and Apple refuses to provide any other keyboards. This is a bummer, as all the computers are much cheaper than in Europe.

www.applecentreorchard.com, Wheelock Place, 501 Orchard Road, Singapore, +65 6238 9378

I must be a magnet for computer related troubles. Today I found out that our living room PC (an HTPC system) didn’t start anymore — it just complained about missing NTLDR file… I searched the web and found a solution quite fast, booted up with a CD and copied the files from the CD to the Windows partition. Tried again, no success.

Then a simple thought came up in my mind, and I switched the boot order of the hard disk drives in BIOS and suddenly everything was okay again.

Are computers against me or do I just use them in so bizarrely complex ways that they do not have any other possibility than to fail on me? These recurring episodes with various operating systems are gradually forming a revolutionary idea that I’d be better off without computers.

The problem is that I cannot even fathom such life. I’ve been using computers over 20 years, first copying small programs from MikroBitti magazine to my VIC-20 tapedrive, later designing and implementing my first commercial programs with Amiga and now cursing with Windows XP and Mac. They are so deeply inside me and my being as person that I’m very afraid to let them go. Most probably I won’t, but maybe I should?