2004

Today I tried to migrate my weblog from Movable Type into WordPress. I like the WordPress interface a little bit better and it manages multiple categories more efficiently. I’m already using dynamic templates with Movable Type, so I wouldn’t really benefit from WordPress’ dynamic system. The switch was just too much of a pain for it to be worthwhile. The WP installer is great — literaly takes five minutes. However, I would have to spend hours modifying my template code because I make extensive use of MT plugins. In the end, I gave up on the effort because I wouldn’t have gained amything from the switch.

However, it was a fun experiment. I’m now more familiar with the WordPress templating system, which is well done! Until Matt and the WP worker bees roll out some more killer features that trump MT, I’m going to stick with Six Apart’s baby. I’ve been very happy with the progess made in version 3.0 so far and the quick response about the server load issue made me a very happy user. WordPress is a great system, but in the end I just wasn’t compelled to make a switch. Maybe in the future.

I talked to Om Malik today, who has also been toying with the idea of switching to WP. He agreed with me that after experimenting with it, there just wasn’t enough reasons to make a switch. So when I roll out a new design for his site in the next few weeks, the site will still be powered by Movable Type.

This morning, I booted up iTunes to see if I could purchase a song from Rare Earth, an R&B band that James Lavelle sampled for the U.N.K.L.E. project. U.N.K.L.E. opens every show with this song, and I wanted to hear the original in its entirety. The song is available on iTMS, but of course you have to purchase the whole album to get the song, because the RIAA knows that kids like me wouldn’t buy any of the other songs.

Shame, shame, shame. This model is already broken, which explains why P2P is growing in popularity once again.

Apple markets the iTMS as being able to buy the music you want on demand. Well, I think this is a load of garbage. Take a look at the Rare Earth album. Supposedly you can buy tracks for 99 cents, right? Well, the Rare Earth album only has seven tracks and yet the album costs $9.99. Well, it must be because two of the tracks are long, right? Well, Apple has never made a distinction about that. Apparently, only “radio friendly” singles are 99 cents a pop. Sheesh.

The other offering that pissed me off lately was The Complete U2. I’m a U2 fan and I wanted to download some of the tracks from that package that I can’t get anywhere else. However, for all of the unreleased tracks, you have to buy the whole set. I already own numerous U2 albums on CD and I don’t feel like purchasing them again. The set is way too expensive, priced at $140.

This is from yesterday’s logs:

#reqs: #pages: %bytes: URL
-----: ------: ------: ---
   48:     44:  2.44%: http://www.best-deals-online-gambling.info/
   37:     33:  1.18%: http://www.best-deals-weight-loss.info/
   27:     25:  1.03%: http://www.top-deals-online-pharmacy.info/
   23:     23:  0.67%: http://www.top-deals-pills.info/
   22:     20:  0.99%: http://www.best-deals-hotels.info/
   19:     19:  0.70%: http://www.best-deals-diet.info/
   18:     18:  0.90%: http://www.best-deals-tramadol.info/
   17:     13:  0.54%: http://www.top-deals-viagra.info/
   15:     15:  0.79%: http://www.best-deals-levitra.info/
   10:     10:  0.02%: http://www.best-deals-roulette.info/

Has anybody else noticed this happening lately? Apparently the owners of these sites think I’m going to give them a visit because they’re bombing me with fake traffic.

I added a script from Flickr that displays my latest 6 photos to the front of my site today. The process was very easy since Flickr generates the code for you. I got it up and running in less than a minute. What an amazing service. Flickr will be all the rage in 2005, just like when Blogger or LiveJournal started up.

This morning, I switched my journal over to dynamic publishing. That means no more rebuilding, which is a godsend. I have over 1,000 entries in the journal, and rebuilding takes forever when I make a template change. That’s now a thing of the past.

The migration is straightforward as long as you don’t use too many Perl plug-ins in your templates. Luckily, the plug-ins I use, namely Markdown, SimpleComments, and SmartyPants have all been ported over to PHP. I do use a couple of Plugins that haven’t been ported, but I worked around it. I’ll have to wait for Amputator, Compare, and Columnize to get an update.

For Dreamhost users, you do have to modify the default .htaccess file present in the MT documentation. You need to change the line:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /mtview.php [L,QSA]

to a modified version:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/blog/mtview.php [L,QSA]

You also need to change the error section:

<ifmodule !mod_rewrite.c>
  # if mod_rewrite is unavailable, we forward any missing page
  # or unresolved directory index requests to mtview
  # if mtview.php can resolve the request, it returns a 200
  # result code which prevents any 4xx error code from going
  # to the server's access logs. However, an error will be
  # reported in the error log file. If this is your only choice,
  # and you want to suppress these messages, adding a "LogLevel crit"
  # directive within your VirtualHost or root configuration for
  # Apache will turn them off.
  ErrorDocument 404 /mtview.php
  ErrorDocument 403 /mtview.php
</ifmodule>

Here’s the custom version:

<ifmodule !mod_rewrite.c>
  # if mod_rewrite is unavailable, we forward any missing page
  # or unresolved directory index requests to mtview
  # if mtview.php can resolve the request, it returns a 200
  # result code which prevents any 4xx error code from going
  # to the server's access logs. However, an error will be
  # reported in the error log file. If this is your only choice,
  # and you want to suppress these messages, adding a "LogLevel crit"
  # directive within your VirtualHost or root configuration for
  # Apache will turn them off.
  ErrorDocument 404 http://yoursite.com/blog/mtview.php
  ErrorDocument 403 http://yoursite.com/blog/mtview.php
</ifmodule>

Also, dynamic caching is great. Take advantage of it. My blog is very zippy when using caching and it now I don’t have to deal with rebuilds.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for the past two weeks, and I like the system a lot. There are new plug-ins available which let you synchronize your bookmarks to Firefox and post with a right-click menu directly in the browser. The site is really coming along as a web platform.

However, I keep running into too many issues getting the links to display on my site. I’ve been posting links in an integrated format on my weblog for quite a while now, and there really isn’t a perfect way to get the links seamlessly integrated. Jeff Veen’s Perl approach is almost exactly what I’m looking for, but not quite. That method still clumps the links together by day. I also don’t want to deal with setting up cron jobs which tax the server unnecessarily.

The other main problem with del.icio.us is no import/export. I’m sure this is being worked on, but for me I can’t use the system until it’s made available. Until that day, I’m sticking with MT for all my publishing.

My friend Sung aptly compared the new Episode III trailer to the George W. Bush presidency:

It’s weird how i’m tantalized by this trailer, having seen Episodes I and II. I should know better. Let’s compare Episode II to George Dubya’s first term in office. It was so bad I should never expect anything out of Episode III. Yet people line up to buy tickets, as people voted for Bush.

iTunes is currently my favorite music player because it works flawlessly with the iPod (big surprise) and has an easy to use library with ratings. Of course the program has a few shortcomings, as does pretty much all software. One thing that has bugged me with the program is that you can’t fast forward through a song or rate tracks with the keyboard. You can pretty much control everything else in iTunes with the keyboard.

I hunted around on Google this past week trying to find a program that uses the iTunes COM module and enables you to use global hotkeys. I finally came across iTunes Remote. Don’t confuse this with the Mac version. It’s a totally different program. iTunes Remote for Windows lets you create a custom skinned iTunes miniplayer and global hotkeys. I’m not using the miniplayer feature currently because it uses more RAM and I don’t need it. The hotkeys work perfectly though. You can specify song rating commands as well as fast forwarding.

The program is still in beta and requires .NET framework 1.1. Give it a go if you want to rate your songs faster and have more control over iTunes though. It’s worked fine for me so far.

I found a new program called iTunesKeys that is more stable than iTunes Remote and it works perfectly with iTunes 7.

I was optimized my computer for performance today and noticed a blank entry in my startup items. The item was referenced to HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run even though I specified in Steam not for it to run at start-up. I unchecked the startup item but left the registry information in tect. Let’s hope Valve fixes this one before the Half Life 2 release.

Went to see Sky Captain this afternoon, and I thought it was really well done. The story was cheesy but the visual effects were amazing, reason enough to see the film in theaters. Jude Law and Gynweth did an excellent job as usual and Giovanni Ribisi was perfect for his part. I thought the ending was a bit stupid, with the whole “Noah’s ark” theme, but the beginning of the film was reason enough to see it.