Ramblings

How lame is this: it’s the middle of February and I have my A/C running!

Well, I decided to give it a whirl. I have installed WordPress version 1.5. I haven’t bothered to get my old theme (Blue-Fade) working yet, and I’m not sure if I will. One of my plugins (adds links in the html header for site navigation) decided to misbehave on subpages, but it worked just fine on the front page. Go figure … I may attempt to debug it later, but it isn’t mine so I’m not scrambling to fix it.

It appears that gnome-blog 0.8 finally made its way into portage, so now I can drop my overlay that I created to add it. It still has the broken WordPress support (it assumes wordpress is installed in a wordpress subdirectory), so I still have to go and manually edit the python. No big deal, but I don’t see an easy way to let the author know about this.

Well, the Gollum supplement/replacement has been ordered from newegg. It’s on the way … more about it later since it’s class time right now.

I spent about two hours this afternoon posting new pictures for the Quad. If you are a registered user and would like to check them out, go to http://www.quad4.org/photos/.

We are looking into building a new machine to act as our server. Gollum (the current machine) has done great recently, but we are looking at this more from a redundancy viewpoint than a strictly replacement one.

Here is a wishlist at newegg showing the parts that I have thrown together for it so far. Nothing is written in stone …

The idea is to build a new machine that stays here in Longview with me. It would become the primary machine once I have it set up and running. Gollum would then get moved to La Porte and sit on the cable connection there and handle secondary DNS, and failover everything (or at least as much as we can figure out)

Hopefully, if, for whatever reason, my connection here in Longview dies (thank you Longview Cable, you suck!) then Gollum in La Porte would be able to handle the load for a while. At a minimum I’d like Gollum (in a backup role) to be able to handle web, email, and dns. The web stuff doesn’t have to be bleeding edge current and the email would hopefully just queue up for ultimate delivery to the new machine (and maybe provide access to the email via POP3 or IMAP).

Any thoughts? I still need to really sit and think about how I want this to work. Oh, and John Spiegel has offered to host backups of actual files (nightly backups are really needed and I’m not doing it right now) and a slave DNS setup for my domains.

Google is up to something. But it may not be just Google. I’ve seen an unusual amount of traffic from the crawlers in recents days, and not just a spike in numbers, but a spike in frequency, duration, and several other keys metrics. No idea what is going on … it’s been so crazy that even on some of my moderate traffic sites (like http://www.ka5cvh.com) the bot traffic has outstripped any other normal traffic.

Oh well, I guess if something shows up in the news in a week or so I’ll know it may be somehow related.

Oh ya, I found the file that defined where to look (after I installed it) for the XMLRPC file. Updated it to not look in a subdirectory and deleted the ‘compiled’ version so that it would regenerate it based on the new code. Cranked up the applet again … and bam! Here it is. Now if only I can get this change somehow pushed upstream. Maybe some extra field if you select WordPress so that you can specify where to look.

I’m testing out this cool panel applet that allows me to post to my blog. The only problem is that it expects my blog to be installed in a ‘wordpress’ directory on the server and I can’t easily change where to tell it to look for the xmlrpc.php file. I temporarily have hacked a workaround by creating said directory and making a few modifications to the xmlrpc.php file to get it to work.

Of course this was all after creating a portage overlay directory and compiling the latest version of the applet, which isn’t in portage yet. It wasn’t nearly as hard as I was afraid it would be. Thank goodness for Gentoo-Wiki.

I’m trying to hack the Python that this thing is written in so that I can just tell it to not look in a subdirectory, but my first attempt at this modification has failed. Back to try again …

Something that we have all known was coming appears to have finally happened: Runyon’s engaged.