…through the eyes of a dead man.

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Mike Whybark has a great post up looking at the current frenzy over Mt. St. Helens — and the potential costs of that frenzy.

So, let’s review. Large numbers of people are traveling to a location near the geographic center of a massive prior eruption’s blast zone. Scientists caution that while they don’t expect an eruption on the scale of the previous one, they are by no means certain, and their interpretation can change at any time. The mountain is growing rapidly. The shape of the crater from the previous eruption would direct a large blast directly at the visitors.

Well worth reading.

iTunes “Club 69 Future Mix Vol. 2 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Club 69 Future Mix Vol. 2 (full mix) (1998, 1:13:27).

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…

.com, .org, what’s the difference?

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Last night during the VP debates, I noted that Dick Cheney mentioned factcheck.com when responding to some of Edwards’ claims about Haliburton. I didn’t actually check out the site immediately post-debate, so I’m just now picking up on this funny little tidbit:

Cheney most likely meant to direct people to factcheck.org, from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.

He actually directed people to factcheck.com — which redirects to George Soros‘ website, where visitors are immediately greeted with a banner message proclaiming “Why we must not re-elect President Bush: A personal message from George Soros”, and a headline a little further down the page that says “President Bush is endagering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values.”

[Update:]{.underline}

Here’s what FactCheck.org has to say about the flub:

Cheney got our domain name wrong — calling us “FactCheck.com” — and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton.

In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn’t profited personally while in office from Halliburton’s Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney’s responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.

Go, Cheney, go! If only all Republicans could be this helpful.

Next track! Next track!

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It always screws with my head when a radio station is playing a song from a CD that skips.

I keep instinctually yearning for a “skip” button — which, of course, doesn’t exist on the radio. Calling would be useless, as by the time I got through, the song would be over. So I just sit, cringe, and hope that it’s all over soon…

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.