SRHuston Dot Net

Now that I’ve tested WordPress 2.1 and found that the themes and plugins I use work fine (there was a slight problem with PHPEnkoder, but it turns out that problem existed before and I just hadn’t noticed it; the author has since squashed the bug), I upgraded all the sites to run the new version.

Of course, they also released another new version in the last couple days, which Dreamhost will soon have available for updating.  Oh well, at least that one will be slightly less worrysome since it’s a minor upgrade.

Still need to do the wanted update to Fedora 6, but Joshua is once again living with mostly new hardware (carried over one of the NICs, the SCSI card and the hard drive as a primary slave now).  As soon as I can upgrade the OS, I’ll copy off the files from the old drive and probably trash it – it’s been making unhealthy noises for years now.  Then again, I’ll have to weigh the unhealthy noises against the pain in the neck (literally) of reaching into that cabinet to pull out and reattach all the cables…

After I can’t remember how many years of service, my desktop computer – which originally was purchased in the early 1990s and was upgraded in some way a few times over the last decade – has quit altogether.  It might just be a power supply, but since the machine is so old I’m not sure I want to try to find a replacement power supply or just take this opportunity to replace the machine.

In the mean time, there’s limited Internet access at home, since Joshua was not only my desktop computer but acted as the gateway and router for the house as well.

Well, Dreamhost is upgrading PHP on all their machines over the next few days/weeks, and one of the issues with the upgrade is that versions of WordPress less than 2.1 will be broken. So, they suggest two possible fixes; either upgrade your WordPress installation to 2.1 or higher, or downgrade from PHP5 to PHP4. Turns out that all the sites I have WordPress running on are using PHP4 already, so I didn’t have to do anything. But looking through, there’s some new features and functions of WordPress 2.1 that would (or could) be nice. Only problem is, there’s a lack of information about what plugins or themes will be broken after the upgrade. So instead of upgrading a site to find out things don’t work, I’m going to setup a test site running WordPress 2.1, and install all the plugins and themes that I use elsewhere to see that it’s running properly. Since Dreamhost makes it simple to setup subdomains, and it doesn’t cost anything, this seems like a simpler solution than upgrading one of the sites I maintain and finding out things are broken – and I might be able to find fixes for the problems and get things running anyway, and either submit patches upstream or at least know what needs to be changed on the sites so that they’ll work after the upgrade.

Of course, the data center that houses a good chunk of their servers is going down this evening for about 5 hours, so who knows how much of this work I’ll get done before the connection to the machine goes bye bye.

A long time ago, I wrote an open source plugin for Eggdrop IRC bots. It was a hack, wrapping the functions for talking in channel around an “artificial intelligence” program. I named it after the original program, MegaHAL, and released it with no warranty, no support.. just a “hey, works for me, enjoy.” Until my email account at my former university was finally closed, I still would get emails from people, now 7 or so years later, asking for help getting it to compile. Others have taken up the torch in keeping it current (and I run one on irc.srhuston.net too).

Seems I’m not the only one that deals with this kind of support nightmare – though in Steve Brown‘s case, he’s even a few more steps removed from the “problem”. Either way, this makes for good reading. And a note to all the users of programs and services out there: Read the documentation (henceforth known as “RTFM”) before emailing people for support. The documentation is there for a reason. You might even learn something – like how to go about finding a solution to your problem, or that a web based IMAP client has nothing to do with your ISP’s quotas.

I’ve mentioned Akismet a few times before – it’s the plugin I installed here which looks at comments for spam, and automatically flags them as such (and deletes them after 15 days) for me.  I mentioned a couple times how it’s doing, and today is another landmark.  As of right now it’s caught 1001 spams for me.  Yay, no more going through comments one by one to get rid of the junk!

I’ll probably not mention this again (at least until I hit 10,000).  Just figured the first 100 and first 1000 were pretty good milestones.

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. 

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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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.