What I’ve been up to

Well, it’s been a couple of days. First, I’ve been sick. Some kind of stomache flu. I ingest, it comes back up within 30 minutes or so. Not fun. Fortunately it’s very slow at work so I could take today off and be more comfortable at home. I did have to go to work for several meetings yesterday though and was miserable. I managed to leave around 2PM at least.

You might have noticed it was awfully quiet around here over the holidays. While part of this was simply a function of the season, and part of this was because I got World of Warcraft and couldn’t drag myself away from it, part of it was also that I expended a lot of geek energy building a machine to replace the server hosting my web stuff. This was precipitated by the fact that comment spammers were destroying my site and there was no clean path to fixing this. I’d actually been planning to migrate boxes for quite a while – in fact I bought the replacement box well over a year ago – but between changing jobs, moving, and the complexities of migrating all my content I never managed to get around to it. Err, that is, until now. The new box is in fact up and running in a very preliminary fashion. Many (many!) things are still broken, some very badly, but it’s functional at this point. There were a number of issues I had to get over or which are still troubling me, to wit: (click to read the full post, it’s rather long)

  • I moved to Apache 2.0. Someday I needed to learn it, this was the closest thing to an opportunity I’ve had. Problem is, I don’t understand it and many things have changed. I have like 9-10 years with Apache 1.x now and the migration has not been simple. (this isn’t a knock on Apache 2.0, it’s an indicator of my admin skills)
  • I made a critical mistake when I initially installed MovableType like 4-5 years ago when I chose to go with flat files instead of MySQL tables. At the time, I didn’t know MySQL worth a damn. This has left me unable to migrate content out of my weblog in anything resembling a reasonable manner. It’s going to take me forever, or at least 20-30 hours of sultifyingly tedious manual labor. And it’s forced me to do what I didn’t make myself do the last time I went through this process: learn enough MySQL that I can get everything in a database. Which I’ve now done. (there’s a potential irony of course, which murphy’s law dictates must occur – what do you want to bet the next time I switch products I will have no luck migrating the BLOG::CMS tables into whatever replaces it?)
  • I’ve tested my process today and I’m going to do the tedious labor required (including even the comments). I’m also going to switch weblogging engines. MT has been great to me but like greymatter and blogger and (forgotten product, Dan Bricklin’s desktop webapp from years and years ago) its time has passed. I respect their need to make money (they’ve gone commercial, for those not keeping score), but I’m not going to pay when there are other (free) products with more features to be had – to wit, Blog::CMS. Integrated Wiki and forums? I’m in. (I’ll note that while I was at Bowdoin we paid for several licenses for Movabletype due in part to my influence, so in a sense they were compensated for my use of it, and we just licensed it at Skidmore, again in part due to my influence)
  • Longtime readers will also remember that the box running this site is sort of borked in that the OS started as RedHat 6.x and made its way up through the versions to the now unsupported Redhat 9. Many things have broken over the years through these version migrations and my own half-informed tinkerings. It’s gotten beyond the point of anyone’s ability to comprehensively fix it (I know, I’ve horse-traded for sysadmin time from folks who really know what they’re doing). And I couldn’t go with Redhat again, they’ve also gone commercial. So I tested a large variety of linux distros (in no particular order, and I’m probably forgetting a couple – Suse 9.2, Mephis, Kanotix, Knoppix 3.6 and 3.7, Mandrake, Morphix, and Fedora Core 3) before settling on a surprise, Unbuntu. Surprising on a couple of levels – first because I entered into the process figuring I wanted a Debian disto but might be swayed by Suse 9.2, and because I was sure I wanted KDE. While I ended up with Debian (and got really pissed at Suse 9.2, their website and forums are an embarassment and whoever is in charge of them should be told to find something else to do for a living), I ended up with Gnome/Debian. Unbuntu has a great install process and a very elegant desktop and their support forums are fantastic. Plus only it and Knoppix correctly identified my graphics card (despite the fact that I carefully selected my card for maximum compatibility – an Nvidia MX 440) and got xfree running with 3d acceleration easily. Anyway the testing process for all these distros took me literally days, and yes, I installed each of them to the machine and did some test driving (well, the ones that would sucesfully install anyway – Morphix would not nor would 3.7 Knoppix, though the live cd for knoppix ran fine).
  • Which leads me into why I would want 3d at all, and the answer is because I hope to turn the linux box into a second desktop, especially as a media desktop, streaming audio and video into my office off my snapstream box, but also simply as an ancillary machine. This has led to a few complications in terms of webserver performance (today for example I discovered that one of the screensaver modules was eating 75% of the cpu and making webserver queries take about a second, doh!) but they’re acceptable tradeoffs for me, we’ll see if they are for the rest of you
  • I’ve saved the worst for last. The new site, which you can tinker with from the URL above, will require registration for comments. It’s the only way to keep the spammers away effectively without getting into a bunch of other pain in the ass stuff (like for example making every comment require you to identify 6-8 characters in an image and type them in). I’ll make the process as painless as possible. There will be some potential benefits, like access to a fully functional wiki and discussion board system. I’ll say more about it when things go live.
  • When will all of this switch over? ha! longtime readers know how much of a procrastinator I am, and there is a lot of work to be done (I didn’t even get into the bookmark database or the photo album – whether to migrate those with comments intact is an open question and I am leaning towards not, though the images will definitely come over – but I have made great progress in the past 2 weeks despite the twin temptations of World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, so we can be hopeful that by February things will be at least in part up and running.