Not Quite a Blog

Do I feel guilty for spending $35 on a t-shirt? Yes.

But, damn if Princeton doesn't need some Gucci.

(via nah)

Someone wrote recently to say there was something funny with my white rice recipe ("White Rice: simple food for the recession"). Turns out I had a major typo in the water amount! Sigh.

And there were some recent disasters with the Waffle recipe I posted a few weeks ago... so, don't cook that one until I get a chance to check it out!

Seems just like "running code" is a good rubric to code by, I'm going to make sure I actually cook exactly from my recipes before posting them publicly here.

I've just upgraded this blog to b2evo 2.4.6.

I realize the theme is rather bubbly, but I'll work on that when I get the time---graphic design takes so long compared to hacking for me!). Meanwhile, if you notice anything broken, holla.

Moreso than getting a new computer these days, moving or upgrading blog tools -- or CMS's in general -- can be a bit stressful. How do you get the benefits of the new or upgraded tool without loosing some or all of your content/presentation? Part of me wishes someone would create a simple "freeze" tool that would just scrape a blog to static HTML and allow you to put that up and no longer worry about vulnerabilities in the old software (note this is especially the case with course blogs, used only for a single semester... their liability as security threats continues way after the blogs cease to be active).

Accordingly, when François announced the 3.0-alpha version of b2evolution was available, I took the opportunity to do a mirror install of the alpha, first installing from scratch and then by copying my databases and content over and doing an upgrade.

Both the scratch install and upgrade worked flawlessly. The 3.0 version is very very slick. Almost everything is perfectly dialed in for optimum hacking.

Here are some thoughts:

• If your apache server is running as nobody:nobody, how do you delete files and directories that it has created? That is, since you don't own them, it's impossible to delete them easily. However, with the help of the interwebs, the solution seems to be to write a php script that will use php to delete the files (because it will be running as the offending user). It can be a bit of a pain to write a php script to go delete these, so I've taken some code from lixlpixel on recursive directory tree transversal that recursively deletes an arbitrary directory tree created by nobody:nobody. Find that here: delete.php.txt (rename it to remove the txt file extension).

• My b2evolution Markdown plugin still seems to work out of the box. I did see a strange bug related to inappropriate header modification right after activating it in the 3.0-alpha. Over the next weeks (or however long it takes to make it to beta or stable) I'll try and recast this plugin using the templates for more modern renderer puglins in b2evo.

• How do you copy a mysql database (so that you don't clobber the real one during tests?). Well, you dump the file and then reload it. Something like:

  mysqldump -u username -p database > olddatabase.sql
  

  Then you can create a new database and source this file into it:

  mysql -u username -p
  create database newdatabase
  use newdatabase
  source olddatabase.sql
  

I did.

Deadline is Tuesday (2/2):

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