Oh, What A ‘diff’erence

New WordPress updates available, so it’s time to upgrade again.  Nice thing is that Dreamhost knows there’s a lot of people that use it, so they tend to patch up their “one click installer” to upgrade the software within a few days – sure enough, I got the message today that they’d patched it up, and the new release was only a few days ago.  The down side is that I’m using one of the themes that they package with your install, so every time I upgrade, all the little changes to the theme that I made disappear (I get “Link buttons” on the top by the search bar, the photo disappears, and posts lose their author & timestamp information).

So finally this time, I did the upgrade, then made a backup copy.  This way, when I finished re-applying my finishing touches to the theme, I could run ‘diff’ on the two trees and generate a patch I can use in the future.  Since they’re fairly simple changes, and don’t affect a lot of the meat of the program, I’d imagine that patch will hold up for quite a few releases.  At least until the next major revision, which supposedly isn’t far away.  😛

Adieu!

Well, that was fun. I finally tracked down the bug in Adium that was causing problems with the Bonjour protocol. A little background I guess.. Bonjour (aka Rendezvous or ZeroConf) is a protocol that is done mostly with multicast packets. The idea is, you plug into a network, and have no idea who or what is around – but all the devices on the network send out these announcements now and then, saying “Hey, I’m a printer” or “I’ve got iChat running, so you can talk to me” and such. It’s a really neat idea, and makes setup for printers a snap; just show up on a network, search for network printers, and there they are. It’s also what allows multiple copies of iTunes on the same network to talk to each other and find the shared music without the computers otherwise talking to one another (or requiring a central server to say “here they are”). Ya know what? This is going to get long-winded and probably boring real quick. Better insert a story break before that happens…

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Bonjour!

Played around a bit today with Adium beta, and Gaim, to get Bonjour running.  It kinda works, moreso on the desktop than the laptop – mostly because of a bug in one of the libraries, which causes Adium to report that it’s listening on a port where it’s not listening for incoming connections.  I tried for a bit today to find the bug in the code, but haven’t so far.  Maybe if I’m feeling like it tomorrow, I’ll get the code to compile on the laptop, and then I can properly debug it.

What gets me is that this bug has apparently been known for awhile, but not fixed.  I think they’re waiting for the original maintainer of the library to swoop in with a new version, but .. the code is 2 years old, I don’t think it’s happening.  So maybe if I find it and submit a patch, they’ll fix the code before the final version comes out.  Or they’ll sit on it until the next major release, which at the rate they’re putting out new versions could be another year or so.

Phase I Completed

Well, it’s late, but about an hour ago I finished Phase I of the phone project.  All the old jacks are working just the same, though none of them need DSL filters now, and everything goes through the new termination blocks.  It’s complete overkill for the number of phone lines in the house (one) and the number of phones currently in the house (three), but this will allow for future expansion as well as keep everything neat, tidy and easy to manage.  Read on if you care, or just look at the pretty pictures.

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The Battle Begins

Thought I’d written something here about this already, but I guess not.  I ordered (and have received) all the stuff I need to start redoing the phone lines in the house.  There’s a lot of complete crap in places – lines that are run to jacks with telephone *cord* (like what you use to plug your phone into the wall) instead of proper cable, places where there’s three splices in a row on the same line for no reason.. it’s no wonder our phones are noisy, though some of that really is the fault of the lines coming in.  So I picked up a butt set for testing, a 66 block and two 110 blocks (one 110 will have the phone drops and incoming lines, the other will be a bridge, and the 66 will link the permanent house wiring with the telco lines and whole house DSL filter – overkill, but it’ll be clean when it’s done), whole house DSL filter, punchdown tool, and a probe amplifier for the later inevitable “oh crap which wire is this one” moments.  Plus a couple adapters for hooking up to test things.  All in all, quite a lot of equipment, and good quality.  Photos of the stuff, plus the beginning of the project (namely, the “before” shots) available in the gallery.

I’m hoping I can pick up the plywood this weekend and mount it to the wall, and I can start Phase I – installing the new equipment, having the NID and protector moved over, and reterminating all the existing wires to the new blocks.  Then Phase II will happen right after the data network lines are run throughout the house, since I’ll be using the same CAT5e cable for phones and data.  Extra benefit is that the telecom network as-is won’t go down, just the jacks will be phased out as new ones come into use.

New WordPress Toys

Over the last few days, I’ve installed a few WordPress plugins, both here and at the radio club’s website. One is Akismet, which as thus far done a wonderful job of snagging spam comments posted here, and not even emailing me about them. They never made it to the pages anyway, because new accounts have to have one approved comment before they can post; but now I don’t have to even see the emails about them, which is nice.

The other plugin is called PHPEnkoder and is related to email. Normally, you’d see an email address like this: Email me! The problem with these links is that they can easily be harvested – a script can read the “mailto” part of the link, and know to expect an email address. There’s ways around that, like using Unicode characters to display the address in a browser but require something to decode them first, but those are easily foiled with a little bit of scripting and not computationally intensive. Instead, PHPEnkoder works by creating a self-referential JavaScript bit that must be executed on the browser in order to display the link. If you have JavaScript turned off, it just shows up with a tag to say “email hidden; must have javascript enabled”. But it keeps spammers away because not only do they not really use JavaScript in their harvesters (it’s CPU intensive), but also because the code itself takes time to execute. Not very long for a single person at a browser, in fact the page where I first wanted to set this up (shown here) only takes an extra second to load. But if a spammer had to load a full Java implementation into their program, and deal with all that CPU load over time.. it’s not worth it to them.

So it’s not perfect.. but it’s much better than it was before.

It Said What?

I’ve mentioned before that Leigh and I run IRC servers. You can connect to irc.srhuston.net (port 9999 over SSL) or wiretap.leighbert.net (same port) if you like. Well, I also have an Eggdrop bot that runs in there, and has an AI module compiled into it (which I ported a long time ago, and some others have taken the reigns for it thankfully). His name is KupaKawfe. ‘Cause everybody needs a KupaKawfe in the morning. And today, he said this:

<KupaKawfe> AstroComp: E) setup the nfs shares in netinfo and ignore the fact that the addresses have to mail things that annoy me regularly :p.

AstroComp is Leigh’s nickname in there.. now, I’m starting to wonder if that bot listening to our conversations is really a good idea…

Uh.. Duh?

There’s some things about computers that still crack me up now and then. Take this photo, for example. I didn’t think any motherboards existed anymore that would still do this:

dsc00010.JPG

Now, for those that might not get the “joke” here, allow me to point out that at the time there was *no* keyboard attached to this computer.  Now re-read the error message, and see if you can figure out the error in their logic.  Hint: Imagine a VCR that comes with a tape to show you how to install and use your VCR…

Oh Goodie!

Looks like spammers have found the site, and are relentlessly hitting it with comment spam.  Maybe if they had half a brain (they never do, why else would they engage in this kind of crap) they’d realize that the stuff they’re posting goes as far as my moderation inbox and gets deleted.  Oh well… you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

In other news, I’ll have photos from the wedding I attended this weekend up in the gallery soon.  I don’t have that many, unfortunately – they requested there be no photos during the ceremony, and during the reception I was chatting with so many friends (and only really saw the bride and groom once, which was of course after I took the cameras back to the truck) that I only got some photos of the folks at our table.  And while I’m uploading stuff, I should probably upload the ones of a previous wedding I went to, where I did get quite a few shots off – they’re in iPhoto on the laptop, just never made it up to the gallery.  Stay tuned; maybe if I bring the CF cards to work with me I’ll sort through them there today.