Samsung Galaxy Note II – Water Damage

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On Saturday afternoon I went for a walk around Singapore’s MacRitchie Reservoir to do some exercise and get a bit closer to nature. The whole circuit is about 13 km if you include the HSBC TreeTop Walk. While there are some small huts dotted around the track, there is one part, near the golf course, that has no cover and no huts. This is, of course, where the heavens opened and I ended up jogging in a torrential downpour, giving myself and my Samsung Galaxy Note II a shower.

I quite enjoyed the whole experience, with the rain drowning out any sound of civilization and I could feel my primal instincts activating to dodge the torrents of water pouring down the track which had transformed into a stream in some places.

Unfortunately, my Samsung Galaxy Note II did not like the experience at all. When I finally arrived at some cover I took my phone out of my pocket and hit the button on the side to turn it off. The phone had already turned itself off though, so I unwittingly turned it on. I didn’t want to open the phone and take the battery out, as everything was just too wet. I just had to wait for the phone to turn on so I could shut it down. Alas the red led started to act strangely with different intensities before the phone died.

After wringing my clothes in the change room at the main entrance area I headed home on public transport. I don’t think any taxi driver would have taken me!

When I arrived home I put my Samsung Galaxy Note II in my dry cabinet with the cover off and battery out. The following day the phone did turn on, but the touch screen became non-responsive and the screen flickered like there was some interference. It didn’t look good, so I decided to take everything to pieces again and put it back in the dry cabinet.

Upon searching online for water damage information for a Samsung Galaxy Note II I found out where the water damage indicator is. Apparently the small white square at the top left of the battery compartment, near the battery contacts, is supposed to have a number of small red crosses on it. When water touches the area the crosses bleed into the white area turning the white square into a red one. Well mine was ALL white. I couldn’t believe that had happened from the phone being in my pocket while exposed to rain from a tropical storm.

I took the phone into Samsung today and have to wait for the quote to fix it. Since it’s water damage the warranty does not cover the problem. I hope it’s not going to be too expensive, but the phone will not even turn on now, so it’s not looking good.

If it is expensive to fix it a friend suggested I should get the new Sony Experia Z instead because it’s water proof and would withstand this type of punishment!

Lesson learned – do not take expensive electronic toys into the rain forest without a plastic, rain-proof bag or water damage will ensue!

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking with WooCommerce

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I finally had some free time to add Google AdWords Conversion Tracking to my baby products website, baby.laydu.com. As described before, this website runs WordPress with the WooCommerce plug-in and an associated free theme.

Creating a conversion metric and associated tracking code is straight forward on the Google AdWords site. You just need to log into your AdWords account, click on the Tools and Analysis drop-down menu and choose Conversions to get started. Once you’ve chosen what you want to track you end up with some code like this:

  <!- Google Code for Purchase Conversion Page ->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  /* <![CDATA[ */
  var google_conversion_id = 1234567890;
  var google_conversion_language = "en_US";
  var google_conversion_format = "1";
  var google_conversion_color = "666666";
  var google_conversion_label = "Purchase";
  if (<? echo $totalValue ?>) {
  var google_conversion_value = <? echo $totalValue ?>
  }
  /* ]]> */ 
  </script>
  <script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion.js">
  </script>
  <noscript>
  <img height=1 width=1 border=0
  src="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/
  conversion/1234567890/?value=
  <? echo $totalValue ?>&label=Purchase&script=0">
  </noscript>
  </body>

Now you just need to add this to the Order Received page in WooCommerce. That’s easy, just go and add the code into the page definition below the [woocommerce_thankyou] tag, right? Not so fast! The code will get mangled by the editor that thinks it is dealing with HTML rather than JavaScript.

With the WordPress editor trying to be too clever you can add the code to the relevant PHP file on the server. For WooCommerce the best place is to put the in the /wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/checkout/thankyou.php. I put my code just after the thank you message:

<p><?php _e('Thank you. Your order has been received.', 'woocommerce'); 
?></p>
<!-- Google Code for Purchase Conversion Page -->
<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */
...

Unfortunately there is still a problem with WordPress 3.5.1 that has been documented for 6 years which replaces the end of the CDATA section “/* ]]> */” with “/* ]]&gt; */”. The quick fix for this is to comment out the offending code in /wp-includes/post-template.php.

function the_content($more_link_text = null, $stripteaser = false) {
      $content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser);
      $content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
/**   $content = str_replace(']]>', ']]&gt;', $content); */

Google has a neat little extension for Chrome, Tag Assistant, which allows you to check that your Google code snippets are working on the displayed page. I ran that on the Order Received page and everything was finally functioning. Now I just need to wait until a customer clicks on one of my ads and purchases something to see if the Google AdWords Conversion Tracking is working as intended with my WooCommerce site.

Credit to SIMON.SCHÖNBECK.DK for his post on a related CDATA problem with WordPress.

WooCommerce – WooFramework Update mkdir Failure

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Over the last week or so I’ve been moving a few WordPress web sites to a new server, upgrading different plug-ins, themes and the WordPress versions as I go. One of my websites uses WooCommerce, as I have discussed before. When I used the automatic updating function for the WooFramework I received the following error: “Failed: mkdir Failure”.

I wasn’t sure how or where the WooFramework fitted into the whole WooCommerce environment, so I thought it might just be a permission problem. Looking at the top level directories everything seemed fine though. I decided to Google, but couldn’t come up with any useful answer.

I ended up downloading the WooFramework and unzipped it in the /tmp directory to check what files are included. I then used the find command to match some of the file names from the downloaded archive to determine the location of the WooFramework in my WordPress installation. The location is in the theme directory under the functions directory:

 /var/www/html/<site_dir>/wp-content/themes/wootique/functions

I then saw what the problem was, the theme directory and files were owned by root. Thus the automatic update function didn’t have permissions to create the necessary directory to download and unzip the updated WooFramework. A quick chown -R of the top level theme directory and the problem was solved!

Hopefully this will help anyone else who faces a similar problem with a mkdir error when updating their WooFramework.