i forgot my memory card for my camera at home, but i brought my camera with me. luckily i still have the backup 4GB CF card in my bag, so i dodged a bullet there.
heh…backup 4GB card.
it’s still funny whenever i say that.
Category Archives: techie
grrrrr
i love wordpress and all. i have been raving about its wonderful plugin architecture, its theme support, and just the general ease of use for content management.
so imagine my disappointment when i decided that i needed to upgrade to PHP5 for some server development stuff to find out that the blog stopped working completely after the upgrade. it seems most of the rest of the PHP stuff on my box worked, but wordpress (though i hear that it may be a PHP bug) doesn’t work when i use PHP5.
so now, i’ve gone through great pains to have PHP4 and PHP5 installed on my box. *sigh* stupid technology.
oh well, at least everyting is working again.
last complaint, i swear
sometimes i have a love/hate relationship with technology. for the most part, i do love technology. from computers, the internet, tivo, and just about anything else you can plug in, it’s cool. but every so often i do have this hate relationship with it too.
lately, it’s been pretty painful because of the server issues i’ve been having. i was debating between redhat or slackware for my linux distribution. i’ve always sort of liked slackware for my servers, but i decided to give redhat a try. but man…redhat has really screwed up their distribution, in my opinion. i don’t really agree with a lot of their default configurations and i’ve actually basically recompiled most of my apps on that box to get it to work the way i want it to.
the BIGGEST pain has been perl. i had decided that you can’t really mess up perl so i installed the package that came with the distribution. then i started to install all the various modules that i use only to find out that something doesn’t work right. now, ordinarily, i wouldn’t care, but it turns out that moveable type (and the two users on my box that use it) needs this feature. so i recompiled perl and all the modules i use tonight just to get things back to working order.
blah.
anyhow, the next server i set up is probably going to be back to slackware. it isn’t as fancy as redhat, but at least i know what i’m getting with it.
pMachine to MT, MT to WP
after a comment was left by a visitor, i decided to check out the pMachine to moveable type import script. it looked pretty straightforward and i quickly got my entries from pMachine to MT.
then wordpress has a MT ==> WP import feature, so i used that to get all my old entries back into the blog. man, talk about going through hoops.
unfortunately, i had pMachine rewrite my links to its internal format, and so all of my links had this weird notation in it. wordpress’ impressive plugin feature saved the day and with some headscratching and some regular expression work, everything seems to have come out for the better! i’m really digging wordpress now, the possibilities seem endless now, and i’ve now written my second plugin for wordpress. pretty easy, actually.
wordpress internals
one of the things that i missed about pMachine, my old blogging tool, was that it would take any links in my posts and force them to open in a new window. i always thought that was cool because i hated having to enforce that in the HTML.
it started to really annoy me and i talked to adam about it and he said that writing a plugin for that kind of behavior seemed to be the way to go. and wouldn’t you know it, it is really that easy.
so i wrote my first wordpress plugin. the more i use wordpress, the more impressed i get by it.
i did have to finally hack at the internals, though. i didn’t like the format of the comment notification emails sent to us and so i had to do a little tweaking there. it’s too bad that the emails sent to the user aren’t templatized as well.
bad, bad server issues
so it turns out that i had some pretty bad server issues over the weekend and the amount of work that is required to get things back up and running is a little overwhelming.
i decided to take the opportunity to upgrade the server and start from scratch. yay…sort of. new version of linux, new database, new web server, new …well, everything. the problem is that i now have waaay too much data to upload if i wanted to upload everything that was on the server. but for now, i’m tarring up my web root to see how bad that’ll be. it’s taking FOREVER.
man…i wish that i had better backups. oh well. some of the auxilary sites are back on the site, but my stuff is just going to take forever. i’ve resigned to that. but i’m going to enforce some clean up for some of the users on my box. i’m not going to upload all this crap back if no one uses it. =P
it’s embarassing, but my old server was an AMD K6-2 333Mhz with 192MB of ram. i had forgotten how old that server was, but it was running my stuff just fine. the new server isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s a little bit faster.
i’ve also decided to switch to wordpress. the new version looks promising, and i was getting sick of pMachine, anyhow. the big question now is whether or not i write some kind of database import util to import the old blog entries into this one…decisions, decisions.
oh yeah, and this is the default theme for wordpress. not shabby, i guess…but i really need to design something new. looks like the next few weeks are going to be pretty busy…
oh yeah..and my email doesn’t work yet. dammit.
very nerdy but
from [url=http://www.girls-suck.net]girls-suck.net[/url], a poem:
Roses are #ff0000
Violets are #0000ff
All my base are belong to you.
i laughed when i saw it.
movable type
i do like the newest version of movable type. i just upgraded [url=http://jenny.ocliw.com/journal/]jenny[/url] to it and after looking around, i’m fairly impressed with the new comment handling stuff since version 2.64. i guess i’ve been a little lax in updating her software. but the upgrade path was actually REALLY easy. i have to admit, those folks at six apart sure know what they are doing.
i also added a captcha authentication thingy for her comments so she doesn’t get so much comment spam. it’s nice that the movable type community has these resources to make it easy. i’m very tempted to switch, but i really don’t like how slow the system is. it just feels painfully slow to use. hmmmmm. perhaps i should start with my dreams of my own blogging software, eh?
freeware programs
as a reminder for myself the next time i need to go through and setup a new computer, here are the programs that i found useful after the jump.
Continue reading freeware programs
photography technique
i’ve gotten several requests asking about the setup of my food photography. i haven’t really done much macro or food photography work so the kind of advice i can give is pretty limited, but i’ll see if i can break it down to some basics after the jump.
for those uninterested in technical photography stuffs, i’d suggest you just move on…
Continue reading photography technique