Monthly Archives: September 2007

Tumble Shamus

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My “tumblelog”:http://tumble.shamuswrites.com is officially up and in working condition. I’m using the “T1″:http://www.livetardy.com/t1/ theme, which is built on the wonderful “Sandbox”:http://plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/, much to my great joy. I did modify the theme somewhat, though, removing the default T1 image in the header and restoring the bloginfo(‘name’) and bloginfo(‘description’) fields to their proper places. I also brought the theme up to 2.3 compatibility with tags and added my webring navigation links to the navbar.

What I like about T1 is the custom styling for each category, giving each type of entry its own special look. I intend to take full advantage of this as this tumblelog will give me a good place to share any all neat videos, photos, links, etc. that I run across in the course of the typical day. Comments are open and welcome – just mouseover any entry for the comment link to appear on the right-hand side. Also feel free to subscribe to my feed, particularly if randomness is your cuppajoe.

No Heroes

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From the sounds of “this review”:http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/005682.html (Warning! Spoilers!) of the _Heroes_ season premier, I’m not at all sorry I’m ignoring the show this year. Sounds as though Kring is still writing flimsy plotlines, and I think I’d find myself ranting on and on about that. I had (very) small hopes that the writing might improve this season, but it sounds like the show is already off to a shaky start. Nope, not sorry at all. I’ll wait for another show with writers who actually know what they’re doing.

WordPress 2.3

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I’ve successfully migrated this blog to WordPress 2.3, and I was actually a little surprised at how painless it was. I did turn up a handful of duplication errors with regard to the wp_term_relationship tables, even though I’d made sure I deleted those tables beforehand, but in spite of that, I think everything migrated to 2.3 just fine. The UTW conversion went _very_ smoothly, converting nearly 1200 tags and over 4100 tag-to-post relationships in about 3 seconds. Very slick.

I’ve also just spent the last 45 minutes upgrading plugins, thanks to the nifty little plugin update notifier that’s now built into WordPress, and I’ve also coded this theme to be compliant with WordPress 2.3 tags. I’ll rebundle it tomorrow and distribute it on the download page. All in all, I’m very happy with what I’m seeing.

This is the only one of my WordPress installations that I’ve run tags on, since UTW was, quite frankly, such a pain in the neck to implement. I’ll be converting a couple of my other installations over to tags soon, as well, and I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a Tumblelog but was waiting for 2.3 to come out before doing so. I think I’ll be setting that up in the near future now, as well.

Bad Behavior Behaves Badly

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Well, _that_ was fun. I’ve been having some issues recently with a couple of my WordPress installations. In a nutshell, every form that has anything to with communication to the database was choking. Data wasn’t being saved to the database, screens weren’t loading properly, functions weren’t… functioning. It took me a little while of searching (and no little amount of stress and worry) but I finally stumbled across “a solution that just felt right”:http://wordpress.org/support/topic/108657?replies=8#post-562986. I’ve been using “Bad Behavior”:http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ for awhile now in conjunction with Akismet to catch and filter out spam. Between the two, they’ve done a fabulous job, making it a rare occurrence when even a single spam item slips through the cracks.

Unfortunately, apparently Bad Behavior has failed before, prompting an upgrade from 2.0.7 to the current version of 2.0.10. Trouble is, now 2.0.10 is malfunctioning and it blocking all scripts that had anything to do with communicating with the database. My guess is that something has gone wrong with Bad Behavior servers, potentially causing some sort of “feedback” loop. I – and a couple of others – have left comments notifying the author of the problem, so hopefully we’ll see a new version released in the near future. In the meantime, problem solved and everything seems to be functioning properly again.

No LaTeX

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So, I found out from submitting a support ticket the other day that Bluehost does not allow LaTeX to be installed on their servers. I’ve no idea why. This may be enough to cause me to start looking for a new webhost again and run a server switch near the time when my annual contract expires. And it’s not just the inability to run LaTeX that’s fueling this; it’s a number of other server limitations I keep running into. For instance, I would really like to set up an openID server for those sites I comment on periodically (like LiveJournal blogs) that allow openID authentication. I’d also like to play around with Habari (still in development), but I can’t seem to get it to install on my server.

So, I’m going to start doing a little research and querying to see if I can find a decent and affordable host that lets me do all these things. Shared hosting is most desirable at this point, since paying the exorbitant monthly fees for a Virtual Private Server is well beyond my means. Trouble is, I’m not sure it’s possible to do everything I want to do on a shared server.

For LaTeX, I need a server that has tetex-extra and dvipng installed, as well as imagemagick. For Habari, I need a PHP5 installation that actually functions like PHP5, instead of being a limited version. And I know something else is needed for openID that I don’t currently have, but I haven’t yet been able to pin down what.

I’m open to suggestions from the community, as well. Anything that will make my research a little easier is most welcome.

Current Podcasts

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Ok, it’s official – I’m a podcast junkie.

I’ve always enjoyed talk radio – but only when I’m driving somewhere. Talk radio keeps my mind engaged in something, which is especially useful for when I’m feeling tired because it helps me stay awake. I also just simply enjoy hearing other people’s opinions about topics I care about, getting different perspectives on various issues.

Books on tape are fun, as well – or, in this case, books on iPod. For that matter, recorded readings of speculative fiction are appealing. For instance, I’ve added Cory Doctorow’s (semi-?)weekly podcast to my listings, though he’s not currently reading his own work. I’ve also had Imagination-X on my iPod (and that’s one I still have figured out the broadcast schedule on yet).

I love these podcasts, and I really enjoy listening to them as I drive to and from work. Probably the best thing about it is the fact that I can get ‘talk radio’ anytime I want it, and it will always be on topics and subjects that I actually care about. I don’t have room for all them on my iPod currently. In fact, I keep having to delete old podcasts I’ve already listened to in order to make room for current ones. But since I’m planning on grabbing the 160GB iPod Classic soon, I’m getting things queued up, especially a couple of podcast novels, in preparation for that.

Here’s my current podcast list, all of which can be located right from iTunes:

* Cory Doctorow
* Imagination-X
* 7th Son
* WordPress Podcast
* Bungie Podcast
* Spider on the Web (Spider Robinson)

I have Cory Doctorow, WordPress, and Bungie on my iPod right now. The rest will be added later when I actually have room for them.

Friend or Foe?

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The crassness of the last frame aside, “today’s Ctrl+Alt+Del”:http://cad-comic.com/comic.php?d=20070917 actually makes me laugh because I can remember writing notes like that back when I was an insecure and outcast fifth grader. I’d recently transferred from a private Christian school into the public school system, and I was _very_ naive about the way people outside Christian circles worked. Aside from one bully in the Christian school I’d previously attended, I’d really had no idea just how mean and cruel other children could be.

By the fifth grade, kids already have well-established social groups and cliques – and they don’t always take to outsiders and strangers very easily, especially ones that are self-righteous, introverted nerds like I was. I really didn’t have more than one or two real friends during the fifth and sixth grade years, but shortly after entering the fifth grade, I’d made what I realize now was a pretty lame attempt at getting some more friends.

During our free time one class day, I’d written up a bunch of notes for everyone in my class that was something to the effect of, “Will you be my friend? Yes or no.” I got a lot of yeses and just about as many nos, even though in the long-run, most of the yeses still didn’t really go out of their way to get to know me. It wasn’t terribly funny to me then, but fortunately I can laugh about it now, which is why this Ctrl+Alt+Del strip makes me laugh. It takes something I relate to intimately and pushes it to an extreme that I find highly amusing.

Oh, and circling the ‘or’ – yeah, that’s something I would do, just to be a smartass.