Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. I just ran out of things to say for a long time. Plus, I figure next to no-one actually reads the site on a daily basis, so it’s not like I’ve been depriving anyone.

A few big updates since the end of September:

• I’ve got a Mac now. A nice, shiny, new iBook G4. And boy is it sweet. I’ve never been a windows person, but boy howdy do I like the Mac. OS is just about perfect, hardware IS perfect (except for the one-button mouse, but I’ve found a solution for that.
• I’ve moved the site to a different machine. It’s still hosted on my “really too slow to host a website” RoadRunner connection, but now it’s running on a box that isn’t my workstation. At the time it was a good idea, since my workstation had been crashing all the damn time. I’ve since fixed that (there was apparently a bug in the firmaware of the integraded Ultra ATA-100 controller on my motherboard; a BIOS upgrade got it sorted). New server is running Apache 2 (I forget the exact version, but it’s whatever’s in Sid. Also, while I haven’t done it yet, I’m looking really closely at switching to Qmail for my email. We’ll see how that goes.

You’d think I’d have more updates after a 2-month hiatus, wouldn’t you? Oh, well.

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I just (well, a couple of hours ago) finished putting in this nifty javascript that makes for large “title” mouseovers. Try it out on the links over on the right, or any link in this post; I added title attributes to them.

I initially saw this on Kitta.net, on the colophon page. I though it looked really cool, so I took a gander at the javascript that does it. The comments indicated that I could swipe it for my own means, so I did just that.

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Wordpress 1.3 includes a “Presentation” section in the admin area; its use is to switch between themes that have been installed. But there’s currently little to no documentation about what themes actually are, and how they’re written, how they’re installed, and how they work.

I seem to have figured it all out. At least, I think I have. There’s still some robustness checking I should do, in case specific files in my theme aren’t present, but here are the steps I took to make what you see here into a wordpress theme.

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Those nifty “next page” and “previous page” links at the bottom of the page finally work! Here’s how I fixed it. Well, actually, here’s the changes I made that corrected the problem. How I fixed it involved digging through PHP files for about half an hour.

It seems that with the Wordpress 1.3 nightlies (and, I assume, the CVS and alpha versions as well), the “blogfilename” option in the wp_options table isn’t populated. I issued this statement in mysql_client to fix it:

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I’d been wondering for the last few weeks what I was doing wrong, such that I was always presented with a “enter super-user password for maintenance, or ^D for normal boot”. Then when my system crashed this morning, and I had to drive home on a break to fix it, I noticed that there was that nice little word “single” on the boot= line in GRUB. Remove that, and presto! The system boots up without me needing to press ^D.

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I finally broke down and got a new DVD player; my old Panasonic one was starting to “No Play” most DVDs (including ones that I’d previously watched on it), and my newer RCA one was manufactured poorly, and the gears would start skipping when trying to access data near the end of discs.

So I went over to my local CompUSA and picked up a Philips DVP642/37. And man is it sweet. It’s better than the Apex I had way back when (which has since gone the way of the dinosaurs): It’s DivX certified, and can play just about anything I want. DVDs work perfectly, of course (I even found the region-free hack so I can play any DVD). VCDs and SVCDs work like a breeze. CDRs with mpeg files? No sweat. And of course it can play DivX movies that are burned onto CDRs as well. If I had a DVD burner, I suspect it’d also play DVDs full of DivX files (handy for my collection of Twin Peaks season 2 avi’s).

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I finally got all of the posts re-postified. I didn’t take the time to put in categories for most of them, though. Even the newer ones that used to have categories. I may go back eventually and put in categories for everything, but that’s really a lot of effort. I think I’ll concentrate my efforts on getting the stupid archive section on the front page working correctly first; then I’ll see about the categories…

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I guess this is just the god of computers slapping me around for not making a backup. I still have my entire post database, but I can’t access it via wordpress. This is upsetting, to say the least. I’m in the process of re-posting them all, but it’s gonna take a bit of time. Especially since I’m modifying the timestamps on each one back to their original values.

Memo to myself: make more frequent backups, dammit.

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Graaaagh!

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Ah. Much better. I just finished upgrading to Linux 2.6.7 (I was running 2.4.23 previously). I didn’t opt for 2.6.8 because of that nasty problem where non-root users can’t burn CDs.

But everything just fell into place. I did need to make a few tweaks to a couple of files, but by and large there were no huge problems. Until I got the right driver loaded for my USB controller (the module filename had changed to uhci_hcd), my mouse was going WAY too fast for me; it was almost unusable.

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