As of the previous post, this blog contains 778 published entries containing a whopping 160,266 words - around 205 words per post. That blows me away. I mean, I remember struggling to write 5.000 word essays. And I write this blog just to document stuff I'm doing, basically for kicks.

That's not all - the 895 non-spam comments on this blog contain a stunning 52,668 words - about 59 words per comment.

This message from Jeremy Matthews just came across the WO-Deploy list, and I wanted to hurl a copy here to remind me to check it out. Looks like the latest stable build of Tomcat 5.5 may include some love for WebObjects... (emphasis mine)

FYI,

We just released Tomcat 5.5.12 installer for Mac OS X 10.2-10.4.2

What's New:
more than 100+ changes from the apache group; view changelogs at:
http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.5-doc/changelog.html

Well, the One More Thing event turned out to be pretty spiffy. Cool new iMac. Some funky new software (but is it iMac-only?) The new video iPod looks sweet - and the high end one still costs less than my 3G 20GB unit did...

The TV-on-iTunes/iPod thing looks like it will be awesome. But... Where is Battlestar Galactica? I'd subscribe to the whole season of that. I will likely buy the rest of this season of Lost, as well - or at least the ones I miss "live". But, BSG? Every. Single. Episode.

I played around with Rails a bit today. I contrived an excuse to attempt to create a generic "event management" application. I'm familiar with the basic requirements of the app, and have a need to have a generalizable app available to share with groups and departments on campus. And, I want to play around with Rails and ruby to get a feel for what it can do.

Well, I had better luck than Stephen did, but still not quite the magic "30 seconds from concept to production app" wonder that has been whipped up around Rails. I was following the "ToDo" howto and going off in my own direction. It didn't work too well, and I've just realized that's because the ToDo chapter is written to Rails 0.9, and I've got Rails 0.8.something installed. Apparently, Big Changes were involved going to 0.9. OK - so that should discount some of these issues/hangups.

While Evan was "napping", I took a few minutes to check in on my blog. Took a look at recent referrers and Technorati links, and found a reference to Tarina - a Finnish blog. Cool. So, I checked out the blog, and found a link to a very compelling presentation on "Identity 2.0"

Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, gave a keynote at OSCON 2005. Initially I was more interested in the description of his presentation style - described as "Lessigian". I'd never heard this term before, so was curious. Turns out Lawrence Lessig uses a pretty kick-ass presentation style, with very simple slides in sync with his talk. No bullet points, just words (and occasional images) reinforcing what he's saying.

Just finishing up a great Thanksgiving long weekend. We didn't get out to do anything too exciting - Evan's still sick - but it was nice and relaxing. I promised myself I wouldn't do any work this weekend. I caught myself a couple times launching XCode, or about to check some revisions or something, and forced myself to stop. That felt pretty darned good. I had a bit of an epiphany recently - I could continue to drive myself into the ground chasing the endless stream of demands, or I can just deal with them as I'm able. In the end, I really believe I won't be any further behind on projects - the time I do put in will likely be higher productivity, etc... - but my "off" time will sure be more rewarding without constantly fretting about the seemingly infinite list of To Do items.

A friend of mine wanted to migrate from an aging B2 installation to a shiny new WordPress setup. I figured it should be a simple process, given that WP was spawned from B2's loins and all. It should have been relatively trivial - tweak some database fields, massage some data, and done. Not so fast, smartass.

Turns out that all of the tips I found were, well, a bit short. They either didn't work at all, or sorta worked, but not enough to be useful. Crap. So, I started eyeballing the B2 schema. Turns out the biggest difference between the B2 tables and the WP tables is - wait for it - the table names. Aside from that, it's some trivial stuff like changing int into bigint, etc...

So, it's 4:50pm Friday afternoon. I'm about to click "Publish" on a post about the random image rotator dealie. Boom. WordPress throws up a big old "Error establishing a database connection" error screen. Crap.

I login to my Godaddy account page, hit the database manager, and PHPMyAdmin can connect. The database is there, and running. WTF. I notice my ShortStat table has ballooned to over 100MB of data. That's insane, so I truncate it. I'll remove the plugin. I check again - maybe I was over my DB quota or something - and it's still no joy from WP. I try Referrer Karma - it uses the same MySQL database, and throws a scarier - but more helpful - error message. "Warning: mysql_connect(): User 'dnorman' has exceeded the 'max_connections' resource (current value: 50)"

It's the Week of Things Working Again. First the Flickr albums via FAlbum, and now the rotating banner image, via "Automatic Rotator."

It's a simple php script that you put in a directory of images, then every time it is called, it spits out a random image file from that directory. I modified my css file to point the background of the banner div to that script, so every page view automatically gets a random image. To add a new image to rotation, I just drop it in the directory.

Thanks to a tip from Donncha O Caoimh, I was pointed to the new FAlbum plugin for WordPress. It's a handy Flickr-integration plugin that uses the new Flickr API - even works with my merged Yahoo.com account!

I've installed the plugin, and added it to the tabs again. It's got some minor display funkery, where it looks like it's not playing nice with K2 (or vice versa), but the plugin itself works great! It would rock if K2 added support for this one...

They sure are persistent little buggers. I think I've reverted about 50 pages of wiki spam in the last week, on 2 wikis. The little cretins just won't take a clue. They're just smart enough to be able to switch or spoof IP addresses to get around the blocks and bans, but not quite smart enough to realize that I won't let them win.

And, looking at my Referrer Karma blacklist, there are spamroach URLs in there that make even me blush. I mean, these people have nothing better to do than to register dozens/hundreds of obsene URLs, then feed them into their little script kiddie auto-blog-spammer software and see if they can scrape some Google Juice out of it.

It wasn't anywhere near the level they were playing at the end of the last season (over a year ago). The Flames didn't even show up for the first period, and gave up some silly opportunities in the second and third. They did have one hell of a rally, to come within one point in the third, but because of earlier screwups it was just too much to come back from.