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.
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.
They’regoing to announce that the Google Toolbar will be bundled with Safari! That’s groundbreaking news that will change the world! (interesting - meant to link to Jonathan Schwartz’s “the world is about to change” post, but it appears to have oddly vanished…)
Seriously, though, I really hope it’s a video iPod, with a writeable screen ala Newton… I’d cut off my left earbud for one of those…
I decided to give the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress a shot. It’s going to be supported natively in the K2 theme that I’m using, and UTW comes highly rated. I was a bit nervous about migrating from the Cat2Tag plugin I’m using now, because I wasn’t sure how it would handle ~900 posts that were already categorized. I didn’t want to have to re-tag all of those posts. I picked Cat2Tag because it used the Categories themselves to store tags - so if I decided to switch back to Categories, it was just a matter of turning off a plugin, and doing some housekeeping on the now-messy set of categories. I’ll assume there will be a magical “convert tags back to categories” function sometime in the future…
Julian and I were just IMing about how to set up a new Subversion repository - and we both commented about how this process should be documented. King set one up last week, and we said the same thing then.
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.