Moving Blog Homes

 Technology, WordPress  No Responses »
Apr 212011
 

Giv­en the cur­rent state of OpenSol­ar­is (pre­cari­ous, judging by vari­ous posts I’ve seen over the last few months) I decided to move the base­ment devel­op­ment and blog host­ing machine back to Debi­an. I mostly use it for a couple of small Word­Press blogs, and try­ing out vari­ous things (the odd Django pro­ject, Ruby on Rails, etc), so Debi­an is emin­ently suit­able for that.

Step one: move the Word­Press blogs on to an inter­im host­ing solu­tion, namely the same host where I cur­rently host this blog. My pack­age allows infin­ite add-on domains, so that works. To start with, I made sure I had no broken links on the blogs in their old home — I did­n’t want to try to hunt down errors in the new blogs that already exis­ted on the old ones.

The whole pro­cess worked fairly well (install new Word­Press sys­tem on new host, export the old blog, import to the new one) except for a couple of wrinkles, which I’m detail­ing here for next time I need to do this.

  1. when set­ting up the new blog, before you’ve switched the DNS, don’t put the final URL in the set­tings dia­log. This just means you can­’t log in to the tem­por­ary site and you have to go into PHPMy­Ad­min and fix the URL back to the tem­por­ary ver­sion. Get the site set up prop­erly first, then switch the blog URL and the DNS settings.
  2. The image attach­ment prob­ably won’t work. If you import the posts and check the “import file attach­ment” box, some of them will attach prop­erly, but not all, and you’ll have to manu­ally upload a cer­tain pro­por­tion of your images using SFTP or some­thing sim­il­ar. If you don’t check that box, none of the images will be attached to the right posts and you’ll have to manu­ally upload all of them. If you’ve used stand­ard markup to show pho­tos, that works any­way, but if you’ve used the gal­lery short­code, you’ll have to manu­ally attach the images to the post. The best plu­gin I’ve found to help with this is the Add From Serv­er plu­gin, where you can attach the images after you’ve uploaded them all. It’s still a lot of work if you have a lot of images.

Apart from that, step one went well. Now I have to make sure I have all the oth­er use­ful files saved some­where, and get on with the OS install.

Keynotes and Journeys

 Conference  2 Responses »
Apr 182011
 

Every year, when we start organ­ising North­ern Voice, the ques­tion comes up about key­notes. Key­notes set the tone of a con­fer­ence, they indic­ate some­thing of what the organ­ising com­mit­tee is think­ing, or what they think the com­munity that sup­ports the con­fer­ence might want to hear about. This year, I wanted to find someone as a key­note speak­er who could talk to us about the less sunny side of life, and remind us that some of the per­son­al stor­ies people share online aren’t about good things hap­pen­ing, they’re about life hap­pen­ing, and life isn’t always fair, or easy. The rest of the organ­ising com­mit­tee agreed, and we’re glad that April Smith agreed to present. “Storytelling From the Heart of the City” opens North­ern Voice on Fri­day May 13th. 

The Sat­urday key­note is a dif­fer­ent slant on the web, from Chris Wilson, who’s played a key role in build­ing many of the web tech­no­lo­gies we use every day. I’m not actu­ally sure what he’s going to talk about, but I have no doubt it will be an inter­est­ing view of the web world so many of us now inhab­it, sprinkled with inter­est­ing anec­dotes. I’m look­ing for­ward to it!

Two key­notes, two dif­fer­ent slants on what the web enables, two dif­fer­ent jour­neys. I’m not very good at chron­ic­ling my own jour­ney, but I admire those who do, and I hope (and expect) that the North­ern Voice key­notes will give strength and inspir­a­tion to all of us.

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Submissions Season

 Conference  No Responses »
Mar 102011
 

It seems that the north­ern hemi­sphere spring is the reg­u­lar sea­son for sub­mit­ting papers for two of my favour­ite con­fer­ences. So I guess that means it’s the reg­u­lar sea­son for remind­ing y’all, and being reminded of the dif­fer­ent styles of conference.

First up, because the dead­line for abstracts is Monday March 14, is North­ern Voice, Van­couver­’s per­son­al, non-work, con­fer­ence aimed at help­ing people find their voice online, wheth­er that be through blog­ging, twit­ter, face­book updates, or pho­tos. I’ve been on the organ­ising com­mit­tee since the begin­ning of North­ern Voice, and have been con­sist­ent in want­ing a con­fer­ence that isn’t cor­por­ate, does­n’t give spon­sors key­note slots, isn’t ori­ented towards busi­ness and mak­ing money. What North­ern Voice is ori­ented towards is what people find import­ant for their per­son­al lives, wheth­er that be the per­en­ni­al ques­tion of blog­ging under a real or an assumed name, or giv­ing advice on how to cope with too many emails (ok, that one could also be use­ful in busi­ness). More details at the web site.

In con­trast there’s Bal­is­age, which is not at all about how to get good pho­tos of your cat, but rather a ven­ue for deeply tech­nic­al talks about markup in all its forms. It still isn’t cor­por­ate in the sense of selling key­note slots to big spon­sors (you notice a trend here?) and its audi­ence is lim­ited to those who do enjoy intense dis­cus­sions of how best to struc­ture their inform­a­tion, and for whom the finer details of the XML spe­cific­a­tions are not insig­ni­fic­ant. For this con­fer­ence abstracts aren’t enough, you need to write the full paper, in XML, and sub­mit by April 8th. I review papers most years, and look for­ward to see­ing what’s hap­pen­ing in the bleed­ing edges of XML-related technologies. 

Hmmm, it’s prob­ably not a coin­cid­ence that both of these con­fer­ences are small, and run by people who care pas­sion­ately about the con­fer­ence and the respect­ive com­munit­ies that they serve.

Internet Speed

 Technology  6 Responses »
Feb 252011
 

I was reminded again today of the old adage that even when you think you know what the prob­lem prob­ably is, until you meas­ure it, you’re likely to be wrong. This applies par­tic­u­larly to factors that impede your inter­net speed.

The ADSL inter­net band­width pack­age we signed up for, many moons ago, was 3 Mbps. I know, that seems laugh­ably slow to many of you, but I don’t down­load video much and it’s adequate for my needs. On a whim, Tim decided to test the speed and found it to be only 1.14 Mbps (even when tak­ing out everything in the way, such as fire­wall and router). We tested a few times, and got sim­il­ar res­ults. So even­tu­ally we called up the ISP and com­plained, they ran their tests and found noth­ing, and as a last resort from their side, offered to send us a new modem.

Now the mod­el I had was less than a year old, a Thom­son Speedtouch ST516 V6, which I’d bought when I had trouble con­nect­ing last year. So I was doubt­ful that it would turn out to be an issue with the modem, more con­cerned that it might be an issue with the phone wir­ing in this old house. But hey, it does­n’t hurt to try a new modem, so we agreed.

A couple of days later, a new Thom­son Speedtouch ST516 V6 modem shows up in the mail. I plug it in, run speedtest.net again, and all of a sud­den we’re get­ting 2.12 Mbps, a good-sized increase and much closer to what we’re pay­ing for. (The house wir­ing and vari­ous oth­er factors prob­ably make up the rest).

So now I’m puzzled. Two modems, from the out­side exactly the same, with the same mod­el num­ber, bought 11 months apart, with very dif­fer­ent res­ults. It’s not like there are user-con­fig­ur­able jump pins on the back that could be set wrongly. The only thing I can think of is that I got a dud with the first modem. Any­one have oth­er explanations?

Word 2010 and Thunderbird 3

 Technology  1 Response »
Feb 142011
 

My major cli­ent uses mostly Microsoft products: Out­look + Exchange and Office. It turns out that the com­pat­ib­il­ity with Open­Of­fice is lim­ited when it comes to large doc­u­ments and defined styles, so I upgraded my old Office 2003 to Office 2010 on my Win­dows 7 PC desktop. And then ran into anoth­er prob­lem: file cor­rup­tion in email attachments. 

I use Thun­der­bird 3 to fetch mail via IMAP from the Exchange serv­er, but every time someone sent me a Word doc­u­ment, I’d get this error mes­sage about not being able to open it in Word 2010 because it was cor­rup­ted. If I used the Out­look Web Access cli­ent it worked fine, so it was­n’t a cor­rup­tion at the serv­er. And Word 2003 used to open the same types of doc­u­ments sent to me by the same per­son, so at first I wondered if it was some­thing to do with Word’s upgrade.

Hunt­ing around Moz­il­la’s getsatisfaction.com web site gave me a point­er to Spe­cial Thun­der­bird IMAP Set­tings at the Michigan State Uni­versity’s Phys­ics-Astro­nomy Com­put­ing Sup­port Site (they have inter­est­ing art­icles on lots of related issues). Basic­ally, the issue is due to Thun­der­bird chunking the file as it pulls it down from the serv­er, which intro­duces some cor­rup­tion. The same appar­ently also applies to using the Gmail IMAP serv­er, although I haven’t noticed any issues with that. 

To fix it, go into Tools…Options. Select the Advanced tab, click on “Con­fig Edit­or”. Search for chunks. Click on the res­ult­ing set­tings to make sure they’re all set to “user set” “false” (they will be in bold once this is done). Close the win­dow and press OK to save. I then restar­ted Thun­der­bird to be on the safe side (not all con­fig set­tings take effect without a restart and I did­n’t feel like test­ing it). Then (and the web page I linked to did­n’t include this step), right-click on the account name in the list of accounts/folders on the left (in the stand­ard win­dow con­fig­ur­a­tion), and choose “Prop­er­ties”. You should see a “Repair Folder” but­ton. Click on this to make Thun­der­bird fetch everything again, with the new settings.

Prob­lem solved! I still don’t know why Word 2010 had prob­lems with doc­u­ments that Word 2003 could read, but I don’t care enough to try to find out.

Family Fondue

 Food and Wine  No Responses »
Jan 292011
 

With a picky four-year-old who loves veget­ables but won’t eat much else (she won’t touch pizza or sushi, for example), and an elev­en-year-old who’s only slowly start­ing to appre­ci­ate veget­ables and fruit (but loves both pizza and sushi, as a typ­ic­al Van­couver kid does), meal­times are often a struggle. On a whim a few months ago, I made fon­due and dis­covered how pleas­ant a peace­ful meal where every­one cheer­fully eats what’s in front of them can be.

Cheese fon­due the way we make it is simple, and reas­on­ably healthy, as long as you have no lactose-intol­er­ant or vegan people at the table. I slice up whatever veget­ables and fruit are around, and every­one has some bread and lots of veget­ables or fruit to dip into their cheese. There’s some­thing about the com­mun­al dip­ping that’s attract­ive, the col­ours of the veget­ables and fruit con­trast with the creamy sauce that each piece is coated with, and nobody keeps track of just how much every­one eats. 

Cheese fon­due is laugh­ably simple and quick to make. I make it in the fon­due pot on the stove (we have a gas stove) so there’s less wash­ing-up after­wards, and start to fin­ish it takes about 15 minutes.

I always wash and slice the veget­ables and fruit first. The staples on the table are an apple, some sug­ar snap peas, a bell pep­per (cap­sic­um) or two, some broc­coli spears, some cherry toma­toes. If we have oth­er veget­ables or fruit that won’t fall off a fon­due fork too eas­ily, those go on the table too. A loaf of good hearty bread, or a crusty French baguette, are also de riguer.

The fon­due itself has 400 — 500 g of grated cheese (about a pound) for four people. We like the clas­sic gruyère and emment­al (as well as a mix­ture). Brie is good too (cube it rather than grate it, and toss the rind as it won’t melt). Old ched­dar is a little too sharp for some, a milder ched­dar is bet­ter. After grat­ing, toss the cheese with about 2 table­spoons of flour. Heat slightly more than a cup of white wine (some­thing with some fla­vour that isn’t too sweet, such as riesling, gewürztram­iner, pinot gris, or pinot blanc) in the fon­due pot until it bubbles gently. Stir in the grated cheese + flour, stir until the cheese melts and the fon­due is smooth and reas­on­ably thick, serve.

We’ve tried lots of dif­fer­ent com­bin­a­tions of cheese, wine, and veget­ables. Exper­i­ment­ing is part of the fun.

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