Perhaps you were a fan of the Panzer General series, or the broader General series of wargames from SSI back in the day, or maybe you just like wargames or turn based games. If any of those possibilities apply to you, check out People’s Tactics, a free, Win32 turn based strategy game. By default it’s a WWII game, though it’s extensible and there are several modifications available for it including a Lord of the Rings conversion. Simple, serviceable graphics and rock solid gameplay, with a lot of scenarios available for it as well.
htaccess tools for the inexperienced webmaster
Running your own apache webserver, and confused by the breadth of possibilities for htaccess files? Check out htaccesstools.com, a collection of forms-based tools to help you generate htaccess files for some of the most common uses, like error pages, redirects, and password protection. If you need more detail, or you’ve grown comfortable with some of the easier stuff and are ready to tackle more complicated tasks, check out this exhaustive list of resources on brainstormsandraves.com.
Automate that Mac OSX metadata
Now here’s a handy little extension to Apple’s Safari web browser – downloadcomment adds the URL of your downloads to the file info meta data of files you download with Safari. When you think about this in the light of what Spotlight can do with that meta data it becomes really useful. Free, mac osx only.
A credible alternative to Azureus
I love Azureus, I really do. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the java-based bit torrent client with enough bells and whistles to satisfy even an attention deficit santa’s helper, and it’s got a really great GUI. But it’s also got that ponderous JVM overhead and a voracious thirst for ram. If you’re on windows and you want a simple, lightweight alternative, check out utorrent. None of the bells and whistles of Azureus, but your system load will drop by an order of magnitude.
About commenting
For those of you who have tried and failed to comment, I’ve fixed this. For now the site requires registration to use, in an attempt to get me out of having to do comment moderation. If no one is commenting after a few weeks because you’re too apathetic to bother registering I’ll revisit the issue. If you’re concerned about privacy or me selling your email address to spammers or something, you have my solemn vow: I will not sell or otherwise provide access to your contact information, including your email address, to anyone. Having said that, I’d also advise anyone commenting on weblogs to just bite the bullet and get a spam account if you don’t already have one, or use a service like gmail that does a really good job of filtering out the spam.
Sorry about the growing pains, it’s supposed to be another crappy weekend this weekend, meaning I should have plenty more time to work on the site.
WordPress themes
A brief word about the site’s new appearance. It’s interesting – basically since I started blogging I’ve done a somewhat regular redesign of the site which among other things let me exercise my technical skills, but this time around, partly due to a lack of familiarity with WordPress and partly due to the change in focus of my day to day job (I’m much more of a sys admin these days and much less of an html geek), I’m going to use someone else’s templates, at least for a while. The one you’re looking at is not the one I will neccesarily stick with though, sometime over the next couple of days I’ll post links to the ones I am considering and let you all decide. Maybe by xmas I’ll get around to building out my own templates again, I’ve got a few things in mind but no time to puzzle out WordPress’s structure so that I can do it on my own. Yet.
Server migration ‘complete’
[update] – for those of you who’ve arrived here via my RSS feeds – the summary is: I moved my website to a new server and made a variety of architectural changes while so doing. Use the links on this page to update your RSS reader subscriptions – going forward the old feeds will remain static and simply point at this weblog entry. So that you have them handy, the feeds are:
RSS – http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/?feed=rss2
Atom – http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/?feed=atom
[end of update]
Complete in the sense that the old box is powered down, the content is all migrated, and my domains have been pointed over to the new server. Much remains to be done. In terms of what I did exactly:
I migrated my movabletype weblog data in its entirety to wordpress. I cannot believe how smoothly this went, it is a credit to the wordpress developers, huge kudos to them.
I migrated over my photo gallery, 700 MB of photos, tarred up. This also went super smooth. I did not yet migrate to Gallery 2, I’m still using the 1.5 series of their software for now, though upgrading to 2.0 is next on the list after I clean up the remaining 404’s, put some of my old content back in place (like, say, the homepage), and settle on a template for wordpress.
I (finally) got a publicly accesible wiki installed, something I have been procrastinating about for about 2 years, which is here. If you want an account, let me know and I’ll hook you up. Right now it’s wide open, we’ll see if hackers manage to deface my site before I get around to finishing off the configuration and locking it down. I have an interesting project in mind for the wiki which I will bring to light as soon as things have settled down.
I have officially migrated to http://www.metamusing.net as the domain of this site. The old domain is pointing at the new machine, but all the software tools (ie the wiki, weblog and gallery) are configured for metamusing. This is in part because I am going to go public with this site, again as soon as things have settled, and in part because daves-place is mostly a legacy – I’ve owned metamusing for over 2 years now, and the transition to the new box was the excuse I needed to finally move over to my ‘real’ address. This means you should update your bookmarks accordingly.
A few words on how I ended up with WordPress: I’ve been intending to upgrade this site for at least a year and a half. The old daves-place box is over 4 years old, and it was well used when I got it and has been running its operating system on the same drive for the whole time I’ve had it. The box has been literally running 24×7 for over 4 years. The only time it came down was when I moved from Maine to NY last summer, when it was down for about a month. To say I was living on borrowed time was an understatement. I do have to give credit to abit though – the board is a dual cpu BP6 running two celerons. The cpu fans haven’t worked in years, yet the thing runs like clockwork. I haven’t decided what I am going to do with it yet, if anyone has an interest in it or an interesting idea for it, speak up.
Anyway as soon as I settled into life in NY I started experimenting with toolsets. I wanted a couple of things out of an upgrade – an integrated wiki and better image management. After some early experiments I preliminarily settled on Blog::CMS which bundles a set of tools into the base weblog engine. But after some time working with it I concluded it had a set of issues – inferior image gallery and a clunky weblog engine being my chief complaints. At the time wordpress 1.5 was out and I had hated the previous version, but when 1.5 shipped I clicked with it, and started using it at work as an experiment. Gallery 2 also shipped during this timeframe and I basically worked out that I could use Gallery 2 as an image database with WordPress and Mediawiki using Gallery 2 as their image storage system, which both provided me with what I had been looking for and provided for a relatively seamless transition, and (aside from me not yet updating to gallery 2) that’s where I am at today.
I did consider one other system – Typo, the ruby on rails powered weblog engine. I’ve mentioned here repeatedly how awesome Ruby on Rails is, and it was very tempting to move to a system based on it. But the bottom line is it is early days for Ruby on Rails, despite how quickly they’ve grown so popular. There isn’t a robust ruby image gallery system, nor is there the breadth of developer support surrounding Typo that you find with WordPress. So, for now, it’s WordPress, with an eye on RoR as they evolve. Will it be another 4 years before I switch? And if it is, it will be really interesting to see what this marketplace looks like as compared to now.
To close, a historical footnote – this weblog has migrated through a variety of platforms, though most of you are only familiar with its movabletype incarnation. I started with Trellix of all things, WAY back when, at least 7 years ago. Then I moved to the still available Greymatter for a time. Next came the Movabletype based system that lasted for four years, until today’s migration to WordPress. WordPress is the first time where the previous incarnation’s content migrated into the new system, though interestingly while archiving things on the old server I found a tarball of all the old Greymatter content, which I might port over to WordPress depending on what all is in there (it’s been 5-6 years!).
In terms of hardware, this is the third computer to host my web content. I started with a creaky pIII running windows, then moved to red hat linux after I discovered I’d been hacked by benevolant intruders- they left me a note and a collection of video codecs after raiding my anime collection, assuming incorrectly that I was trying to play the files on my server (I wasn’t, I was sharing them with my friends, back when anime wasn’t playing on the cartoon network). Then I moved to the Abit BP6 dual cpu celeron I mentioned above, and today I moved onto a Biostar small form factor IDEQ 210 running the latest ubuntu beta, which I am also using as a desktop system (and really enjoying, I might add. If you IM me in the evening these days, chances are you’re talking to my ubuntu linux box). I should also mention that I came within a hair’s breadth of moving all of this over to a mac mini, and sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have, but career wise keeping it on linux was the better move since it helps me keep my skills sharp.
Movabletype celebrates its 4 year anniversary
There’s a bit of sad irony to be found in their announcement, in that I have been using movabletype since the day it was made available, was a huge fan of it in its early days, introduced its use to two different academic institutions (both of whom use it now) and a number of my friends, and yet almost to the day of their 4th anniversary, I switch weblog systems, this time to wordpress. In fact this post is the first one I’m constructing on my new server, using my new install of WordPress. I tip my virtual hat to them – their software has served me well over the years. Still, I can’t help feel a little sorry for them in that they are increasingly losing their market share, to WordPress especially. In part I think this is due to their product being perl based. Like it or hate it, Perl’s popularity as a web app development environment is fading, and the amount of support and addon products available for php packages like WordPress makes the Movabletype software universe look….anemic. On the other hand, I guess Typepad is doing ok for them so maybe all ships rise on a rising tide and all that. Meanwhile though, I’m off to WordPress land. I’ll make a second post describing exactly what I did this go around and why, for those curious about the technical nitty gritty.
Rainy saturday? No problem
I can finally get some work done. Spent a ton of time on the new server today – wordpress, mediawiki, mysql, phpmyadmin and a host of dependent packages are now up and running on the new box. Tonight I’m going to try importing my weblog data – if that goes well, all that remains is working on the image gallery data.
Speaking of which – I posted three new galleries here from hikes in the adirondacks. One is old, from the early spring, which I had forgotten to post – Vanderwhacker Mountain, and the other two are from the past two weeks – Treadway Mountain and Snowy Mountain. Check them out – tons of cool photos including a lot of panoramic shots and psuedo-3d quicktime VRs of the summits.
Take control of that ATI video card
If you use an ATI video card on win32, check out ATI Tray Tools and take control of your video card. This free utility exposes all of the hardware settings of your card, most of which are normally hidden away in registry settings. It’s got tons of other features as well – game profiles, a plugin architecture, comprehensive overclocking utilities – and is definitely worth installing if you’re a PC gamer using an ATI card.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 