Geek On The Mountain


Some People’s People


May 24

Posted: under General.

Lucas: “Have you seen my new blog yet?”

Milenka: “No. [Goes to site. Skims over the last few entries.]
You write so much, and none of it’s worth reading.”

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Star Wars….Finally


May 24

Posted: under General.

We’re finally going to see episode III in just a little bit here. (I can’t stand to call it ROTS….it looks too much like ROTT (Rise of The Triad, and old PC FPS that I barely played) for my liking) Seeing as though more people have seen it in the last few days than probably about 99% of all movies (it should already be in the top 50 for the most US revenue) I’ve felt rather left out. Poor me. I’m just going to go ahead and expect the world and we’ll see what I get. :) I had to give Milenka a run down of the first two moves just a little while ago as she didn’t remember exactly what had happened. Admittedly, neither did I, but I watched them a couple of weeks ago while she was at work one day (don’t tell her though… :) ).

On a not exactly related note, the series finale of Andromeda was on the other day. Yeah, it kinda sucked. I mean, it was a nice ending for the series, but it just didn’t seem there was this wonderfully huge climax. It just wasn’t dramatic enough to do a whole lot for me I guess. So it was nice, but not the most entertaining thing in the world. I think they did a better job with last season’s finale actually. Sadly though, the show is over. Of course, I still have half of season 2 and all of season 3 to watch.

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WordPress


May 24

Posted: under Technology.

I’m now running WordPress! Woohoo. Like the new look? Me neither..

It’s the default template. What can I say? Technically so speaking, it doesn’t look bad per se. It just looks like…hmm…. any other WP blog using the same default template perhaps? I’ll fix it eventually….

The installation was super super easy. They say it takes only 5 minutes, but they were wrong. It took more like 2. (Technically, if you figure in the time I spent downloading the installtion file, uploading to my server and the unzipping it, it’s probably closer to 5) Importing all my old MT entries was a snap as well. I’m even reasonably sure that they’re all there.

The only snag I ran into was the fact that the index file it generates starts off in it’s own installation directory. There’s an option you where you can change where this file should go, but after doing so it doesn’t actually move it correctly. You have to manually move the php file and then edit it to fix a path to reflect your new directory structure. This is actually really simple, but I spent 20 minutes messing around thinking that it was supposed to be doing it on it’s own before I figured it all out.

Once again, to get technical about the whole thing, I’m still running MT as well. It’s going to stay put for a while, although there will be no main index and no new posts.

I might as well start making a todo list here..
Everything should be working with WP now. I’m not so sure how we’ll do on comments. I’m thinking that I’m going to go looking for some comment spam protection ASAP. WP seems to have a built-in blacklist function, but it looks like the blacklist is empty….. Plus, I had such good luck with the security code that I can’t see any reason to mess around with blacklists and moderation and stuff. The main page is missing some key items that the old one had, like my quotes, movie/book/music lists (which are themselves MT blogs that I’ll have to export…), images…The list goes on I suppose. Of course search engine links will still work as long as the MT blog is still around, but it will need to transition to the WP blog in time (I hear there is a good utility out there that will link old posts with new posts).

And the biggest problem….broken links…urg! Any of my posts that refer to other posts are going to have dead links once the MT blog is gone. I’ll need to (probably manually) fix those as well.

For now though, I’m excited and I like the new setup.

I think it’s especially cool what it does with mod-rewrite to make it look like posts are located someplace that they’re not. I know a lot of sites do this, so there’s nothing new there, but I never realized that it was mod-rewrite that was doing all the dirty work. For example, click on the title of this post and then look at the url in your address bar. It’ll say something to the tune of http://www.slaad.com/2005/05/24/wordpress/. It puts the date and the title right into the URL, when in reality there is no 2005 directory underneath the root directory of the site at all! Totally cool.

Oh, and you might wonder why I changed platforms. It really comes down to licensing. I never liked the new licensing terms (even though they would have done little, if anything, to place restrictions on me they way I blog) of MT 3 and therefore stuck with 2.661. Of course this means that there would never be any upgrades for MT for me (unless they went to a less restrictive license in the future…I’m not holding my breath for that). If you’re standing still then you’re really moving backwards, so there was no future there for me. Also, along the lines of licenses, I’m a fan of open source, so WP is a logical choice.

Basically, the whole change of platforms was a lot easier than I thought it would be and I’m happier where I’m at now.

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My Inbox


May 24

Posted: under Technology.

Do you have any idea how many emails I have in my inbox? 449.

Do you have any idea how many emails I have that are unread in my inbox? 402.

Do you have any idea how many spam emails I have in my inbox? 0.

Yeah, it’s sad. This is just how disorganized I am. It’s pretty simple really. Before I reinstalled windows, I had Thunderbird download the emails but not actually delete them. I think I had it setup to delete them from the server when I deleted them in tbird, but I reached a point where I decided I didn’t want to delete anything and instead started shoving messages off into different folders locally. On the server, they just stayed in the inbox.

So then I reinstalled windows. This of course means a new copy of tbird and as soon as I have it configured and I click on the “Get Mail” button I find that I have hundreds of emails in my inbox. I therefore decide that it isn’t even worth the bother to try to restore my old setup from my backup since I just downloaded everything anyways.

Of course, that was a couple of months ago and the emails just pile up since I only sometimes delete them yet I haven’t bothered to actually organize them either.

I’ll get around to it someday.

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