Incoherent Keyboard Bashing
Posts tagged site
Updating
Nov 2nd
I’ve spent the last four days re-organising my blog. Changed the theme, added tags to posts – damn I’ve got a lot of drivel here… four years worth! It’s been an interesting experience going back over my old posts, comparing what I was thinking back then to how things have turned out now. Some of my thoughts were pretty naive, but then I’ll probably always think that when reading my old stuff.
It’s also interesting to see how my mind set has (or hasn’t) changed over the years, also considering that I have posted such cryptic crap that I have no clue now what I was on about back then.
I recently got into twitter, thanks to my big red-bearded friend. Using a plugin for the site, I have integrated the two systems – for no particular reason other than I can. If it wasn’t for Digsby, I probably wouldn’t bother with updating twitter at all anyway.
Fun and games in fairy land
Oct 30th
The server has been down for a day or two while we changed the distro. It was running an obsolete copy of Mandrake, and it was just not possible to update the thing any longer. In my travels, I have come to like the Ubuntu distro – and best of all, it’s based on Debian, so updating it to new releases is a breeze.
I’ve been running Ubuntu server on a machine at home for quite awhile, so I was reasonably familiar with it, hence my decision to get it running on this box. We tried to reload the box a couple of months ago, but we couldn’t get the Hardy Heron installer to recognise the hard disk in the machine sigh, so I eventually gave up when searching for solutions wasn’t too fruitful.
I recently saw a note that Ubuntu 8.10 RC1 was available, and since I was in the mood for some punishment, I thought we could give reloading another go with 8.10, falling back to Edgy Eft if we had the same installer issues. At least if I loaded a prior version of Ubuntu, I’d be able to upgrade to the latest release via some simple commands.
My brother, kind soul that he is, acted as the bum-in-seat, fingers-on-keyboard monkey for me, doing all the crappy stuff like downloading and burning the relevant .isos, and telling me what was happening on the screens via messenger.
We got excited when it appeared that the 8.10 Intrepid Ibex recognised the hard disk and partitioned it, however that was short lived when everything failed on first boot with a hard disk not found type error. Sigh.
So we successfully installed Edgy Eft. After updating it, and then doing the release upgrade to Hardy Heron, everything went pear-shaped when we rebooted. Same error that we got with 8.10. Argh. FAIL. Fortunately we could select the prior kernel and boot back into the system.
After a lot of reading and stuffing around with various supposed “fixes”, we were no closer to a solution. Even the fixes that solved apparently exactly the same issue for other people did not work for us. Most frustrating.
So we reloaded the box with Edgy Eft again, upgraded to Hardy Heron, although this time I changed the default boot to the old kernel. Screw you, kernel 2.6.24. I’ll continue to use 2.6.15 until the horrible bug in the Ubuntu 2.6.24+ kernels is fixed.
As is typical…
Sep 22nd
I don’t check the server for awhile, and the sql backend crashes. Argh. It was down for 5 days before I noticed. I suppose that will teach me to post a bit more often. What’s funny is that nobody else noticed. :p
Damn crackers suck!
Mar 3rd
Looks like the Wordpress 2.1.1 download was compromised. I’m not sure if the download I had was the compromised version, but it never hurts to be safe, so I upgraded all the blogs I look after to the latest version.
Obviously the script kiddies were bored. I wish they’d find something better to do than to try fuck up other people’s web sites.
Toil & Trouble
Jan 24th
I spent this afternoon setting up that blog for my friend. I also used the time to try troubleshoot some issues that I had noticed in the backend of my site, so I backed everything up, wiped the files and loaded a pristine copy. It seems to have fixed all the hassles. If there are any links to local files in old posts, and you get a 404 – that’s why.
I used the brand new pristine blog that I created to test out a whole bunch of themes, and check their compatibility with probably my most important plugin – Spam Karma 2. It turns out quite a few of them had buggered up comment pages which were incompatible, so a quick copy of the default theme’s comments.php seems to have sorted those issues out. Man, it took a long time to test all those themes. I also got rid of a few that were showing blatant errors.
Unfortunately for me, after applying some really nice looking themes, I discovered some issues – for example, with one particular theme, if I used the ‘previous entries’ link, it just kept displaying the same posts, even though the url was changing. Pity, it was damn nice.
My first newly selected theme – Binary News had some display issues with my markdown plugin. For some reason there were no line breaks between paragraphs etc, and it was annoying me. Turns out the theme author had set “margin: 0 0 0px 0″ inside the style.css for some bizarre reason. Commenting that out fixed it. I decided not to stick with that particular theme however, for no particular reason.
Wow, I don’t think I’ve posted this often on my blog ever. :-p The world is ending. Head for the hills!
Strange places
Jan 24th
You would probably be horrified to know that I’m writing this while sitting on the bog…
So, I just won’t tell you.
Instead, imagine me sitting on a beach somewhere, in the shade of a classic palm tree, the ocean waves crashing gently on the shore… Sea gulls squawking in the background – hopefully avoiding flying past me and anointing me – and soft white sand beneath my feet. Ahhh, bliss.
Pity the smell ruins the whole effect.
I decided last night to try and make a concerted effort to blog more than I have been. I want to get in to the habit of writing, and thinking of writing. I said as much to a friend of mine, so I ended up convincing him to do the same. I’ll be setting up a blog for him later today.