Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Back already!

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Well now, that didn’t take long!

As you can see, I’m back…mostly. I haven’t uploaded my old graphics/ directories yet, so many of my old (pre-Flickr) entries will be showing lots of broken images until I get all that taken care of. The most important part, however — getting the words transferred over — has been accomplished. Yay me!

Next steps include getting the images reloaded, taking care of dad’s site, and pfutzing around with the theme so I have something other than the default WordPress themeage going on.

Off and running like a herd of turtles…

Lockdown

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Seeing as I haven’t been writing a whole lot lately, this seems as good a time as any to declare this site on temporary hiatus while I transfer over to the new webhost.

I’ll be turning off comments while I pfutz around with things, and there will likely be some (hopefully small) amount of time where things essentially cease to exist before I get everything transferred over.

Be back soon(ish)…

Jumping Ship?

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So…

…if, while moving over to my new digs, I were to take advantage of the one-click WordPress installation offered by Dreamhost and finally dip my toes in waters other than those of Movable Type, are there any pieces of advice I should know about? Plugins I should pay particular attention to? Tips or tricks I should know or avoid?

So far, I’ve managed to track down PHP Markdown and PHP Smartypants, and have activated Akismet, but that’s it (and all this is on a non-public test installation). I’m particularly interested in seeing if there’s a good (easy to implement) ‘tagging’ solution, such as I’m using here in lieu of categories. Googling for ‘wordpress tags‘ tends to bring up lots of information on the formatting tags used in WP templates, which isn’t what I’m aiming for.

Anything else?

iTunes “What Is Life” by Mullins, Shawn from the album Big Daddy (1999, 4:09).

Probable Downtime

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Theoretically, I should be able to move everything from my current server onto Dreamhost’s servers, flip a virtual switch, and have everything work without any interruption in service. However, I’m having some issues figuring out just how to make this work with Dreamhost’s setup (which is making me feel a little on the dumb side, but that’s beside the point).

It’s entirely possible that at some point in the upcoming weeks, there may be a few days (hopefully not much more than that) where this website isn’t accessible. I hope that this won’t last very long, if at all, but it’s a distinct possibility. Consider yourselves warned.

Bowed but not Broken

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Things have been a bit quiet around here lately. Sorry ’bout that (since I know you’re all heartbroken over this turn of events). While I’m not at liberty to divulge details (or even broad hints, for that matter), suffice it to say that the past few weeks have been…stressful. However, it looks like the universe has decided to take a break from throwing curveballs, and I, for one, welcome our new stress free overlords look forward to returning to the usual day-to-day concerns.

Prairie’s birthday was this past Friday, and we had a very pleasant day of relaxing at home, with one short jaunt out to see Flushed Away, which was hilarious and well worth seeing. Here at home, we watched Monster House, which was also extremely good (and wonderfully, surprisingly creepy at times), opened presents, and had a very good strawberry cream birthday cake (with chocolate covered strawberries on top, even). A few pictures have been uploaded.

Thanks to the answers to one of my last posts, and with many thanks to Jer‘s discount code, I’ve created an account with Dreamhost and will be moving my sites over that way…hrm. As soon as I can, actually, given that I’ve got this next month to do it. Oh, for the days of copious free time (whenever those days were, I think it’s been a few years since I had more than one or two such days in a row). Update: After having lain fallow for the past year or so, serving only to redirect to this address, djwudi.com is now up and running as a photography gallery. One domain down, two to go…

And I think that about brings us up to date. School continues, as does work, without much of any great note on either of those fronts. Prairie and I are continuing to work on nailing down the details for a trip to Alaska right around (technically just after) Christmas, and we’re also doing what we can to assist a friend in planning their move to the fair town of Seattle.

So, there we are. Some small amount of actual content. It had to happen at some point, right? ;)

iTunes “Alive Alone” by Chemical Brothers, The from the album Exit Planet Dust (1995, 5:16).

Time to Move

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For the past couple years, this weblog (along with my father’s blog and my Jason Webley bootlegs) has been hosted through the kindness and generosity of Michael at Rain City Story. However, he’s decided it’s time for him to move on to other projects in his life, so it’s time for me to start investigating other hosting options.

At the moment, the two providers I’m looking most seriously at are Media Temple’s (gs) service and Dreamhost.

On the surface, Dreamhost looks like a better deal ($10/mo for 200 Gb of storage and 2 TB of bandwidth vs. $20/mo for 100Gb of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth), but (mt) was Michael’s recommendation. I don’t really know about either company, so I’m open to suggestions.

I thought about simply moving back to Typepad or some such thing, but I’d hate to have to lose the Webley bootlegs page, and between the bootlegs and dad’s site being pretty image heavy, we tend to chew up a good amount of disk space and bandwidth.

Any ideas, suggestions, experiences with either (mt) or Dreamhost, or other recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks much!

iTunes “My Spine” by Fluke from the album Puppy (2004, 7:22).

Desperation

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Heh.

Someone just came to my site via a Google search for “oh god give me a job i need a fucking job just give me a job i want a job okay“.

As if that search string isn’t amusing enough on its own, wanna take a guess at which page they landed at? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count. ;)

iTunes “Material Girl” by K.M.F.D.M. from the album Virgin Voices: A Tribute to Madonna Vol. 1 (1999, 4:27).

Aperture

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Consider this firmly on my wishlist come Christmastime: not only has Apple just upgraded Aperture to version 1.5, but Frasier Spiers has announced the first beta of an Aperture version of his excellent FlickrExport plugin (I consider the iPhoto version of FlickrExport an unconditional must-have for iPhoto/Flickr integration, along with Ken Ferry’s Keyword Assistant).

Even better, the educational pricing for Aperture is just $150 — half off the standard retail of $299.

It’s not a critical need, but it’s definitely a wishlist item. So pretty…

iTunes “Nebulus” by Fluke from the album Puppy (2004, 5:57).

Cydonia redux

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The European Space Agency‘s Mars Express orbiter has obtained new, high resolution images of the ever-popular Cydonian ‘face’ on Mars, putting to rest (again) the myth that there’s actually a constructed face on the surface of the red planet.

Cydonian Face in perspective

A perspective view showing the so-called ‘Face on Mars’ located in the Cydonia region. The image shows a remnant massif thought to have formed via landslides and an early form of debris apron formation. The massif is characterized by a western wall that has moved downslope as a coherent mass. The massif became famous as the ‘Face on Mars’ in a photo taken on 25 July 1976 by the American Viking 1 Orbiter.

Image recorded during orbits 3253 and 1216 by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express. Image is based on data gathered over the Cydonia region, with a ground resolution of approximately 13.7 metres per pixel. Cydonia lies at approximately 40.75° North and 350.54° East.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum), MOC (Malin Space Science Systems)

This seems like as good a time as any to revisit one of my favorite silly posts from the past: Mars Needs a Facelift!

NASA has recently released photographs of the famous Cydonian face on Mars that show that one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have yet of alien intelligence is in danger of being eradicated from our Solar System.

[…]

The only question now is how is this happening? […] The only answer I can come up with is that the Face is being deliberately destroyed to hide its existence from us! This single image — released by NASA itself — does more to prove that the Government has been hiding information from us (either about its own capabilities, or about its involvement with extraterrestrial intelligence) for years than anything previously found!

Heh.

(via /.)

Hot Tunes

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Goofy idea that I don’t have the programming chops to create:

A plugin for iTunes (originally I was thinking of a separate program, but I think that this could probably all be done through Applescript) that, when activated, polls the weather services on the ‘net for the current temperature and then randomly selects a song from the year that matches the current temperature. A sunny summer day of 85° would produce synthpop from 1985, a cool fall afternoon of 63° would play the rock and roll of 1963.

Options that should be included:

  • Some form of fahrenheit/celsius recognition.
    • Switch between the two systems (85°F/1985 is 29°C/1929).
    • Converting between the two (85°F plays 1929, 29°C plays 1985).
  • Choosing songs from the decade, rather than the year (85° plays songs from 1980-1989, 72° plays from ’70-’79).
  • Applying some alteration (plus or minus X, other transformations) to affect the temperature to year conversion (otherwise, most places would get a lot of songs from the 70’s through the summertime, and many people don’t have a huge collection of 20’s and 30’s tunes to listen to during the winter months).

It’s the kind of silly little one-trick pony that could only be released as freeware, and likely wouldn’t get a ton of usage. It amused me when the idea crossed my mind, however.

(Incidentally, the song I’m listening to at the moment — which will be noted at the bottom of this post — was released in 1979, because according to my ‘puter, it’s 79°F outside. At 11:20pm. Ick. Yes, I’m whining. Yes, Colorado, Arizona, and many other places are hotter than it is here in Seattle. I’m still whining. Candles shouldn’t melt when they’re not lit.)

iTunes “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along” by Kermit the Frog/Rolf the Dog from the album Muppet Movie, The (1979, 3:58).