Year: 2006

On the Air Again

The mov­ing went rel­at­ively pain­lessly, although I should really have waited until the DNS move had taken effect before killing my DYNDNS account, since that meant the site was out of com­mis­sion for a little longer than abso­lutely neces­sary. Mind you, that was prob­ably all of two hours, so not a big deal. Everything should now work again as before.

The quick ver­sion of the steps I took to move Any­way:

  1. copy all the Word­Press files and rel­ev­ant plu­gin files to the new ISP site
  2. clean up the MySQL data­base as much as pos­sible to cut down on size; mostly delet­ing SpamKarma logs and old com­ment spam
  3. deac­tiv­ate all the plu­gins except the spam fighter
  4. export the MySQL data­base to SQL state­ments (I use phpmy­ad­min for this)
  5. import the MySQL data­base to the MySQL data­base set up on the new ISP
  6. make sure the config.php file has the right con­fig­ur­a­tion settings
  7. noti­fy the domain regis­trar of the new DNS settings
  8. delete the rel­ev­ant part of the dyndns account (that could have been done later)
  9. wait
  10. once host laurenwood.org shows the new DNS has taken effect, run the Word­Press upgrade script
  11. turn on the oth­er plugins
  12. run xenu to check for any broken links

My web site does seem faster now, and my web surf­ing is no longer com­pet­ing with the spam com­ments for band­width, so I’d say it’s a win all around.

Kiwifruit Trivia

When Eve was vis­it­ing a few weeks ago, she said that someone was tour­ing gro­cery stores in her area teach­ing people how to eat kiwifruit effi­ciently. I expressed some scep­ti­cism that this was neces­sary; she assured me it was. For fun I decided to do a photo shoot of how to cut and eat kiwifruit the way I learned as a child in New Zea­l­and (it also gave me an excuse to play around with host­ing pic­tures on Flickr). So here you have the series, enjoy! I do find that kiwifruit from New Zea­l­and taste bet­ter, the ones from oth­er coun­tries seem to be less intense and juicy. If they’re not ripe when you get them, put them in a paper bag with an apple to ripen. They keep for some time in the fridge but taste bet­ter at room tem­per­at­ure. Once the skin has star­ted to wrinkle, eat without delay as they are on their way to being too soft and squidgy. I have made kiwifruit lem­on­ade for a party which is fun (the green col­our is start­ling to many people) and a good way to use up squidgy kiwifruit.

uncut kiwifruit kiwifruit cut in half start scooping
first portion scooped out first half eaten almost done

Consequences

It’s awfully cute when you watch a kit­ten play­ing with the phone cord
Marlowe with phone cord
but not so cute when you see the con­sequences of the same kit­ten, now a cat, play­ing with the hand­set cord. I’m sure there’s some sort of par­ent­ing les­son in there.

Chewed Handset Cord

CfS: NV2007

Enough acronyms for now — the Call for Speak­ers for North­ern­Voice 2007 is open! North­ern Voice is Van­couver­’s blog­ging con­fer­ence, focus­sing on per­son­al blog­ging. This means talks on how to solve some com­pany’s PR prob­lems are not really in scope, though tips on how to run a per­son­al blog when you’re also an exec­ut­ive at a well-known com­pany would be. We’re doing the two-day ver­sion again, where Moose­Camp is an “uncon­fer­ence” on Fri­day Feb­ru­ary 23rd, 2007, and the con­fer­ence prop­er is on Sat­urday Feb­ru­ary 24th, 2007.

In pre­vi­ous years we’ve held the con­fer­ence down­town in Van­couver, but we could­n’t get the space we wanted this year. So we’re going out to the UBC main cam­pus, way out west in Van­couver, about as far west as you can go without fall­ing off into the Geor­gia Strait (note, it’s still in Van­couver prop­er, south of the Lions Gate bridge). Cyp­ri­en man­aged to get us space in the Forestry Sci­ences Centre (pho­tos) so we can have all the space we need for talks and the self-organ­ized child­care. I think this will be a fun con­fer­ence, par­tic­u­larly as I’m not plan­ning on being any­where else the week before. Last year I was jet­lagged, hav­ing got back from a trip to Rome the night before, and I still had a good time at the conference.

Oth­er mem­bers of the organ­ising com­mit­tee have blogged it already: Bor­is, Bri­an, Dar­ren, and Kris all have their takes on what’s import­ant about this conference.

At the selec­tion meet­ing I’ll be look­ing for pro­posed talks that cov­er one or more of the groups of people we’ll have in the audi­ence. As a side-note, please don’t just say you can talk about any­thing. That really does­n’t help us fig­ure out who should talk on what — if you have an idea and we think a vari­ant of it would work bet­ter, don’t worry, we won’t be shy in ask­ing you to change focus a bit! I expect we’ll have few­er new­comers to blog­ging, although we will have some of those; to make up for it I expect we’ll have a cer­tain num­ber of people who feel they’ve already said everything that they can say and want to some tips on keep­ing up the excite­ment and interest in what they’re blog­ging. We’ll have some people who want tips on how to incor­por­ate pho­tos, video, or audio bet­ter, and some who still aren’t sure what style sheets are all about. In your speak­er sub­mis­sion, tell us who you’re aim­ing at and what know­ledge they need (or don’t); this will help us fig­ure out how to put everything togeth­er. This is a fun and edu­ca­tion­al con­fer­ence and good speak­ers are part of that, so please put a bit of time into those sub­mis­sions to make it easi­er for us to pick out the good speak­ers! The dead­line is Novem­ber 28th, and this is a real dead­line. Please do use the form and don’t just send us email as we want to make sure we don’t over­look any sug­ges­ted talks, or lose them in some­body’s over-eager spam fil­ter. Oh, and by the way, let us know of talks you’d like to see, even if you don’t want to give them.

Social Networking Musings

It seems social net­work sites are con­sidered the heart of the inter­net these days, at least if you’re under 25 (which I’m not); real-life net­works still exist of course, espe­cially if you have chil­dren (see Tim’s post on Real Social Net­works). I’m old-fash­ioned in that I still use email to keep in touch with people and not exclus­ively instant mes­saging (for one thing, lots of the people I email are in timezones 7 or more hours away) and I have enough to do without writ­ing in strangers’ scrap­books (one big reas­on I deleted my Orkut account was because I nev­er went there except to delete what people had writ­ten in my scrap­book and even­tu­ally I could­n’t be bothered any more). For me the big value of a social net­work­ing site is being able to keep in touch with people I used to work with (in a com­pany, on some stand­ards com­mit­tee, or through the XML con­fer­ence). Giv­en that people in the tech industry move jobs and email addresses with alac­rity, I’ve decided to use Linked­In as a large self-updat­ing address book. This is maybe not the major reas­on that the site exists, but it’s use­ful for that. So as I have time I’m search­ing for names of people I know and send­ing out invites to “con­nect” while I still have their email addresses (I’ve already lost touch with lots of people from DOM WG days, for example); for­tu­nately this pro­cess can be inter­rup­ted when the baby wakes up and demands attention.