In case you missed Apple’s [AAPL] announcement yesterday about this, there is going to be the option (for you) to try to stream today’s conference live.

Wowzers! For real?!?

However, you need to be using a Mac powered with OS X 10.6 or an iOS 4 device, in order to have HTTP live streaming support for the live data stream.

N.B.

If you are not sure whether you can support HTTP live streaming from Apple’s site, try a sample data stream.

In tandem with many Apple [AAPL] product announcements, especially in a live conference format, the online Apple Store tends to be taken offline. When it comes back online, it tends to have the new product SKUs, detail pages, and order pages (or in some cases, pre-order pages).

This time, it appears that it is following tradition for today’s product announcement:

Yep, the Apple Store appears to be offline...

At this time, about 0.5 hours before today’s media event, the Apple Store is– you guessed it– offline.

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So you want to check to see if you can get into the Apple Store? Okay, try this link.

Here’s a poignant tale of blogosphere social media desires, romance, intrigue, deception, betrayal, and redemption, by Leo Laporte.

“Er, what?!?”

Well, okay, maybe my description of Leo’s rant over disconnection (inadvertent) from a social network and his eventual decision to return more devoted to blogging (advertent– and even long-form-ish) is a bit over-the-top, but…

If you are aware of Leo, you know that he has been a fairly industrious Web reporting kind of fellow, and he has certainly partaken of the social media platforms out there.

Now, like Leo, we’ve all been present in at least one way-shape-form in a variety of social media platforms, and like Leo, we’ve all come to realize that some of the simpler forms of data persistence in a Web format remain a better option for memorializing some of those items we feel are truly memorable.

Right?

The answer to that question, “Will the Starbucks iTunes cards be discontinued?“:

No.

According to Starbucks [SBUX], the online Starbucks iTunes code redemption mechanism is in addition to the traditional physical card offering that has graced Starbucks outlets for the past few years.

However, for folks who have historically had difficulty getting the Starbucks iTunes cards in a timely fashion because of stocking problems at their Starbucks stores, this is an attractive alternative.

If you have been a frequent Wi-Fi user at Starbucks [SBUX] and also a fan of the Starbucks-iTunes free media (music and videos) card promotion, you may have noticed that some stores have had recent troubles in keeping the physical cards in stock or, even worse, up-to-date.

How are you going to keep abreast of the Starbucks-iTunes free music and videos?

Fortunately, Starbucks’ online operations may be able to help: if you check their Wi-Fi portal (which often comes up whenever you try to sign into a store’s Wi-Fi hotspot), you may notice the following:

Have you seen this featurebox on Starbucks' Wi-Fi portal?

But, of course, this also raises the question: what are the faithful card collectors going to do, once their outlet of these physical collectibles dry up?

Just in the nick of time (well, actually, merely before the end of July), the first maintenance release for WordPress 3.0 became available yesterday. This provides some bug fixes (over 50) that were discovered since the 3.0 release, or were relegated to a lower status to not impede that major release.

If you have not yet upgraded to WordPress 3.0, you should consider taking the plunge to 3.0.1… it provides a cumulative upgrade path. However, keep in mind that you should still assess whether you have older code modifications, plugins, and themes that may no longer work with WordPress during your upgrade.

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Other related Javamancy posts (in reverse chronological order):

• Introducing WordPress 3.0
• Stop the Insanity! Or, WordPress Development for 2010, a New Year’s Resolution

Other articles of interest:

• WordPress 3.0.1 (WordPress.org)
• Version 3.0.1 (Codex @ WordPress.org)

If you have been following along about the upcoming PHP and MySQL upgrade requirements for WordPress, you may have wondered, “Hey, is my WordPress site ready for the upgrade?”

There is a way to tell (more-or-less conveniently): try the Health Check plugin for WordPress. While the description for the plugin declares that there will be more checks in the future, it currently looks at your PHP and MySQL version numbers to see if you are ready for the upgrade.

As many of you know, WordPress depends upon a variety of software packages to do the things that it does, as a weblog product (and some of you have extended it even further…). Two of these things are foundational items: PHP, the language and operational runtime for WordPress, and MySQL, the persistence datastore that WordPress uses.

Both of these are being incremented upward to more current versions.

For many WordPress  administrators, this will not be a dramatic issue, other than confirming your settings with your site host; some may require some configuration switches being “flipped” to use PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0.15. There may even be some adjustments to your site’s php.ini file.

However, if you’re a big-time hacker, and you’ve been coding in some changes to the base WordPress package (and who doesn’t these days, right?), then you will need to ensure that your code has not been exploiting some of the PHP 4 quirks that have changed in PHP 5 syntax: you will have to rewrite or redesign those parts of your code. For some developers, this endeavor may not be trivial.

On the other hand, the MySQL upgrade is generally better tolerated, since a lot of PHP developers tend to use the provided MySQL connector API. Again, however, if you are one of those who enjoys spinning up your own, parallel data persistence API or are using another package in addition to the WordPress one, you will have to ascertain the LoE for modifying your code. Also, if you have crafted some stored procedures for your MySQL 4 instance(s), you may have to re-implant them into your waiting MySQL 5 instance(s) once they are ready. Code-wise, it should be a straightforward import for most developers.

N.B.

Further reading of interest:

• PHP
• MySQL (now owned by Oracle)
• WordPress

Have Fun!

Happy Fourth of July, folks (at the very least, this should be applicable to our American readers)! Get your game on, with the extended weekend being celebrated across the U.S. Or get your barbie fired up, for you fans of BBQ grilling. Or just relax and let other people do things for you!

A lot of the local news and national news outlets have been reporting that travel plans have improved for this year, not because of an improving economy, but because many people have voiced their frustrations at waiting for things to get better when they apparently are not. As a result, the sense of stir-craziness that has been brewing and intensifying seems to have hit a boiling point, and the public has decided that its time to “get out there” and do something fun.

But, Seriously… Have Fun!

But even if you haven’t left town, you should do something fun. Unwind during these heady days of summer. Have a ball. Eat some exotic foods. Go dancing at a local club. Even try some online gaming with players from around the world. Make some new friends!

N.B.

Read the other Independence Day entries.

Remember the last “big” time that the public was concerned about iPhone reception?

Apple: "... simple and surprising."

“I think there was ‘something’ about– er…”

“Um, yeah, I think there was something…”

So, folks, if you’ll recall (or dive into our archives here), there were the iPhone 3G reception issues that tracked back to issues with firmware installed on those smartphones.

So, now, about two years later, with the latest iPhone 4 release, there are those “new” problems with reception, that very-early reports about the problem have cited being hardware-related… in particular, the steel band antenna that serves as the smartphone’s binding border.

Now, as many of you can attest, while you may have heard about people having trouble with their iPhone 4′s, you may have not experienced any issues whatsoever. So, if it was hardware problem as alleged during the previous 3G reception problem, shouldn’t everybody with an iPhone 4 be experiencing the same difficulties? Curious, right? And if you are one of those unlucky souls with a flaky iPhone 4, why are some of your buddies with iPhone 4′s doing well?

But Apple [AAPL] sheds some light on what it considers to be the real problem, in a letter to the public, as well as its plans for a fix.

So, now it becomes a waiting game, as the afflicted and the media (and yes, even other curious parties, such as Javamancy) wait for Apple to reveal its fix to the world.

And, in a related question: Are signal bars the solution to the world’s ills? Ask Conan O’Brien!

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Here are other Javamancy related posts, in reverse chronological order:

• iPhone 3G Reception Problems Related to Network Traffic
• iPhone 3G Update Released
• iPhone 3G Problems Reported
• Apple iPhone Activation Woes in U.S.