Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Seattle Storm victory rally

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Seattle Storm victory rally, Westlake Plaza, Seattle, WAAs I walked out of the building for lunch today, I heard some sort of big ruckus going on down towards Westlake Center. Being fond of ruckuses (ruckusi?) in general, I made a quick run back to the apartment to grab my camera, and then went back towards Westlake.

Turns out that there was a rally going on celebrating the Seattle Storm‘s recent WNBA championship win.

Now, I’m no big fan of sports in general, but it was fun to wander around the rally for a while. Local cover band The Hit Explosion was playing a surprisingly good set of 70’s disco and funk (amusingly, I think they played just about the entire Muppets From Space soundtrack), so the background music was quite bearable, and it was a fairly welcome break from the usual day-to-day routine.

Some photos from the day are in this flickr photoset, as usual.

Shots of Gig’s Music Theatre

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Gigs, Anchorage, AK Continuing in my little bout of nostalgia for my days running around at Gig’s, tonight I get to present a set of shots from the club, taken roughly between 1997 and 1998 or so.

There are actually a lot more pictures than just these in the pile that I just discovered, however, I’m holding off on posting them just yet, as they’re a lot of old pictures of my group of friends from back then. Possibly eventually, but for now, this will do.

Some shots of the building, and some shots of a few of the bands that played there from time to time. Most of these shots were given to me by clubgoers at a point when I was working on the Gig’s website.

Anyway, feel free to browse and enjoy — some of you might even be able to join me in my nostalgia! ;)

Flyers from Gig’s Music Theatre, 1997-1998 (repost)

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Gigs 071198 I’ve mentioned before that back in Anchorage, I was resident DJ for Gig’s Music Theatre, a non-alcoholic all-ages alternative club.

While I was DJ’ing there, I also ended up producing most of the club’s promotional flyers. I posted these a while ago as a TypePad photo album, but now that I’ve moved off of TypePad, I’ve just moved them all over into a Flickr photo set.

While I’m no great graphic designer, every so often I’d come up with something I like, so the collection ranges the gamut from butt-ugly to pretty decent. Enjoy (or snicker, whatever the case may be…)!

The Death of Superman

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Superman is dead.

“Superman” actor Christopher Reeve, who turned personal tragedy into a public crusade and from his wheelchair became the nation’s most recognizable spokesman for spinal cord research, has died. He was 52.

Reeve went into cardiac arrest Saturday while at his Pound Ridge home, then fell into a coma and died Sunday at a hospital surrounded by his family, his publicist said. He was 52.

Rest in peace, Chris.

Read more

About the server switch

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Okay, so what’s up with switching servers? Those of you who are regulars have probably seen me mention that I was considering doing this a time or two in the past, and now I’ve just gone and done it.

Well, really, the primary motivation is very simple — my finances, as always, are somewhat tight, and as much as I liked having TypePad take care of all the nuts-and-bolts of my hosting, as long as I have a working webserver sitting in my apartment, I just couldn’t justify paying for another year of off-site hosting. I’ve been very happy with TypePad during my year and a half or so with them — and I’m extremely thankful that they were as accommodating as they were when I got Slashdotted — but the time came to let my pocketbook take precedence over my laziness (and ineptness) as a sysadmin and “move back home”, so to speak.

So here we are. There are both pros and cons to the move, as often happens with things like this.

First off, the cons — or ‘con’ (singular), really: things may not be quite as snappy around here as they were when I was on TypePad’s servers. I have neither the high-end hardware nor the high-bandwidth connection to the ‘net that TypePad does. Still, I’m doing everything I can to keep things reasonable, from my usual anal-retentive obsession with simple, clean HTML code to working with MovableType 3’s dynamic rendering and page caching. Hopefully it won’t be too terribly bad (but if it is, feel free to stop by my about page and drop a few dollars in my PayPal tip jar to go towards a processor upgrade for my server!). ;)

Oh — and there will be broken image links on older posts as I go through and move the image files from TypePad onto my own server (moving the actual entries is a simple export/import process…unfortunately, images need to be moved manually).

Now, on to the pros.

No broken links: thanks to the common codebase of TypePad and MovableType, I was able to move everything over and keep all of my permalinks the same, so there should be no need to worry about changing your bookmarks or updating any old links to one of my posts that might be lying around out on the ‘net somewhere (plus, it’s good for the Googlejuice).

Site search: there’s now a search field at the top of the sidebar. If you’ve come here looking for anything in particular other than the daily babble, that should make it a bit easier to track things down. In theory, at least.

Comment moderation/TypeKey/MT-Blacklist: Due to the ever-annoying prevalence of comment spammers, I’ve enabled comment moderation MT-Blacklist for the site. Here’s the rundown on how it works:

The first time you comment here, rather than showing up on the site immediately, your comment will go into a ‘moderation’ queue, waiting for me to approve it. Once I check it and verify that it’s a real comment, I’ll approve it, and it will appear on the page. I’ll try to keep up with comments as best I can, though there may be a delay of anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how close I am to a computer to check in.

As long as you have cookies enabled in your browser and log in from a consistent IP address, the next time you leave a comment, it should appear on the site right away, without needing to go through the moderation process. At least, I think that that’s how it works…it’s all a bit new to me, so if there are growing pains, just bear with me. ;)

The anti-spam plugin MT-Blacklist is being used to watch for comment spam. It should catch and deny any comment spam that hits the website. It will also automatically flag questionable comments and require that I approve them before they go to the site — this includes new comments on posts that are over two weeks old, and comments that have more than five URLs embedded in them.

Now, if you have a TypeKey identity, then there is no moderation process to worry about — as soon as your comment is posted, it will appear on the site MT-Blacklist gives you a ‘free pass’, and will not scan your comments when they are posted. As that’s the quickest, easiest way to go about it, I’d recommend going that route (unless you have some other issue with TypeKey and would prefer not to use it, which is fine, too) — and if you don’t have a TypeKey identity yet, why not go ahead and sign up (it’s free)?

Syndication: I’ve set up all of my syndication feeds to go through FeedBurner. I’m in the process of attempting to set up automatic redirects in Apache so that those of you reading me via a newsreader won’t have to worry about re-subscribing, but that’s proving rather stubborn (odd, since it’s a pretty simple process) — the old feeds won’t disappear until I’m sure I’ve got the redirects working correctly. All my old feed addresses have been redirected to point to the FeedBurner feeds, so you should now automatically be receiving the FeedBurner feeds in your newsreader. However, if you’d like, feel free to stop by my subscriptions page, pick your preferred RSS feed, and grab the new FeedBurner URL.

And…actually, I think that’s it. I’ve kept the same design, and you still have your choice of four stylesheets to choose from (more may show up eventually, but as I’ve been making that particular threat for a good few months now, no reason to hold your breath).

iTunes “Kamennoi Ostrov” by 101 Strings Orchestra, The from the album Soul of Russia, The (1996, 10:11).

Server Switch

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If you’re seeing this entry, it means that the transfer to my new server has gone through.

Expect images to be broken for a while as I get them transferred over — all the actual information should be here, though.

More details to follow, most likely…

Looking for a little assistance

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Okay, I’m hoping someone out there might be able to give me a hand here.

I’m working on moving Eclecticism from TypePad over to my own server. I’ve got 95% of the site framework finished (i.e., the design and the slight tweaking to account for differences between TypePad and MovableType, enabling TypeKey registration, and so on), but I’ve got one little thing that’s causing me issues.

Here, I keep my linklog in the sidebar as a separate weblog, using an SSI command to insert the last fifteen posts of the linklog into my pages. Quick, easy, and very simple to do — and I’m having a bear of a time getting it working on my server.

Here’s what I’m dealing with…

First consideration: I don’t want to break any of the links to the existing pages when the site moves to my server. Because of this, I don’t want to change the extension on my pages to .php or .shtml, so the SSI needs to work within a standard .html page.

Second consideration: My current intent is to take advantage of MT3.1’s dynamic rendering ability, so that only the index pages of the site will be static files on the webserver, all archive pages will be dynamically generated.

Now, one can tell Apache to process every .html page as an .shtml page, but that tends to induce a performance hit as Apache then has to actively look at every single page as it sends it out, rather than just pumping static pages out the pipe and only having to fiddle with dynamic pages. So it’s an option, but one I’ve so far been avoiding.

Apache recommends using the XBitHack to get around this, so that any file sent out that has the ‘executable’ bit set will be treated as an .shtml file, regardless of extension. However, as I want to use MT’s dynamic abilities, there won’t actually be files to set the executable bit (and if I turn off MT’s dynamic rendering, I have no idea if I can tell MT to set the executable bit on the files it generates).

If my pages had a .php extension, I could use a simple PHP include command. However, in order to preserve any and all existing links to my site, I need to keep the .html extention. Now, somewhere in the back of my head I seem to remember reading that there may be some way to include PHP commands within MT templates, now that MT is more PHP friendly (and uses PHP for the dynamic rendering) — if this is true, than it could be an easy solution. However, so far I’ve yet been able to track down any information on whether this is actually the case, or if I was just hallucinating somewhere along the line. So for the moment, I’m going with the assumption that this isn’t an option.

Creating a JavaScript include seemed like it would be an easy solution — have the linklog create an ‘export.js’ file that uses document.write('whatever'); commands, then call the script with JavaScript (using the same basic technique that I use to add things like my Technorati badge, my blogrolls, my Flickr badge, and so on). However, for some reason, that refused to work — nothing ever appeared (and, because of the way JavaScript works, I couldn’t even look at the source for the rendered page to see if it was calling the JavaScript file correctly, as no matter what the browser displays, the source just displays the script call link). I’m not at all sure why this isn’t behaving.

I even poked around at some of the plugins available at the MT Plugins Directory. At first I didn’t think that they would be an option, as they wouldn’t update every time I added something to the linklog, and the list of links on my main page would only update when that page was rebuilt. Some of the multiple blogs plugins looked promising — I even installed MultiBlog, as it includes a way for an update to one weblog to force a rebuild of a different weblog (i.e., adding a link to the linklog would force a rebuild of the Eclecticism blog, keeping the list of links current), but that won’t work either — firstly, it only rebuilds the indexes (so the linklogs on archive pages would only be updated when their particular page rebuilt), and secondly, it doesn’t play nice with MT3’s dynamic rendering (all dynamically rendered pages returned errors — this makes sense to me, though I’ll be buggered if I can actually concisely explain why, so just trust me on that).

So at this point, I’m stuck — every single approach I’ve looked at for getting my linklog working under the new installation has crapped out.

Anybody have some ideas or pointers for me to look into? I’d really appreciate it.