Breaking the silence …

Yes, things have been quite but not really due to a desire on my part to remain quiet :p Rather, it has been due to the fac that I just simply hate to post using the web interface and my work on Blog to get it working with WP was progressing very slowly. Actually, the Blog coding was doing pretty well generally but it was the little stuff where things were going crazy. For instance, I got Blog to retrieve posts from a WP server with no problems at all and to even post back to a WP server but then, Blog seemed to develop a weird slow down effect in selecting a post for the very first time. I finally traced that to the PlusMemo component though I’m still not sure how/why this happens. I’ve kind of sidetracked that problem for the moment but then I started getting another error where Blog seems to hang for the longest time before it shuts down and sometimes I get an access violation error. So, I’ve been struggling with all these problems and while I have stuff to post about, I can’t post because there are just too many problems and I’m just not that sure of Blog itself. Yeah, I know I can use the web interface to post but there’s no point in taking the easy way out :p

The fairest of them all …

Yes, I’ve finally switched … and not only have I switched, but I’ve switched in a big way :p I switched over to using WP yesterday and since then, I’ve updated my install twice – first to the WP 1.2 RC2 that was available for download yesterday and today to the WP 1.2 final. Not only that, I’ve also in this timeframe, written a script to import all of my MT entries, categories, users and comments to WP and a plugin to allow me to blacklist comments posters so as to get rid of all that pesky comment spam.
Sure, there was an existing WP script to import from MT, but I hated how it worked and there was already an existing hack for the blacklist functionality but I hated having to modify the source files and then having to do that again when I upgraded to a newer version – so the plugin takes care of all that nicely 🙂 And now I want to get cracking on Blog so that I can get back to posting here via Blog but that looks as if it might take a while since the blacklist plugin is keeping me busy these days. But then again, the first release of the plugin is ready – I’ve actually installed it here already and it seems to work fine :p So maybe it’s time to move back to Blog …

And the winner is?

Yes, there have been no entries since I said I was thinking of moving to a different publishing platform :p And the reason is that I’ve been busy checking on each of the contenders I mentioned. Incidentally, I should mention that the folks over at pMachine were kind enough to give me a free copy of ExpressionEngine as part of their switch program 🙂 I didn’t really expect to win when I applied but I did and so I gave ExpressionEngine a try as well and while it is all they claim to be, it has a few things missing which made me decide not to go with it. Plus of course, there is the whole "commercial" thing – it’s a commercial app and while I got this release for free, I don’t know if all future upgrades will be free or not and so I’m a bit leery about it. The biggest thing that I missed in ExpressionEngine was the fact that it had no support for an external blogging API. So if I’d switched to EE, then I wouldn’t have been able to blog from BlogMan or Blog any longer.

As for the other contenders, I think I dropped Nucleus at the outset after discovering that their comment spam filtering features weren’t as good as I wanted them to be :p So that left just b2evolution and WordPress. My initial choice was actually b2evolution since it supported multiple blogs and WordPress didn’t but later I learnt that b2evolution’s multiple blogs weren’t really multiple blogs but some form of separating entries using categories – of course, I might be wrong here since it was something I read rather than know for sure due to firsthand experience :p However, it looked as if there was a lot more work being done on WP than on b2evolution and so I settled on WP.

Once I’d settled on WP however, the real work started :p It turned out that WP imported MT entries but first having the user export the MT entries in MT itself and then reading that exported file. However, that didn’t work for me since I’m on a really slow connection at the moment and the export would always fail before it completed. So I decided to write a script which would import the MT entries into WP on the server itself by transferring the records from the tables on the MT database to the tables on the WP database 🙂 It actually ended up being fairly simple to implement but I had to install Apache, PHP, mySQL and phpmyAdmin on my machine before I could get to work :p Once all that was done though, it took me one evening’s work to actually get the script to the working stage and a few more hours of tweaking saw all my MT entries transferred over without any problems (at least that I could see …) to my WP database. Of course, then began the task of converting my WP template to be as close to the MT original as possible but I think I’ve got that covered now as well. All that remains is to put a comments spam moderation system into place and I’m ready to go.

Here’s the kicker – WP has a lot of comment moderation options but I still like Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist best of all 🙂 I want something like that! Now the thing is, I find I work really well with PHP since it seems to be an extremely intuitive language to me. So, I’m going to work on the code for an existing WP hack which actually works a lot like Jay Allen’s plugin and try to see if I can actually make it a plugin for WP. If I can (or once I decide I just can’t do it or it’s too much work :p) then I’ll do the final bit of switching over to WP. Till then bear with my comments on switching :p

Movable Type and Moving My Typing :p

As you are probably aware, I use Movable Type to maintain this weblog. At least, it is MT which handles the actual publishing though I do use my own offline application (BlogMan) to do the composing of the entries and getting them to the server :p The folks over at Six Apart (they are the ones who develop MT) have been talking about a new release of MT – 3.0 – for a while now and I’ve been looking forward to the new release myself. The first pre-public release – they call it a Developer Edition – was announced over the weekend and a veritable storm broke over major parts of the blogging universe :p

The reason? Ben and Mena Trott – the folks behind Six Apart and MT – had decided to go over to a paid model for this iteration of MT. Unlike a lot of the people who use MT, I am neither personally acquainted with Ben or Mena nor do I use MT that much – it is simply the backend handler for SM since I actually do all of the posting from my own application. However, I do like MT and the features it provides. On the other hand, the limitations of the free release under the 3.0 licensing does make me wonder about continuing to use MT and I’m already looking for replacements. This however is a personal decision based on the fact that the free version of MT might be too limited for me to continue to use it and the fact that future license changes to MT might mean that the free version will be even further feature-atrophied.

As far as Ben and Mena’s own decision regarding MT 3.0, I’m kinda divided. A lot of people seem to feel that Ben and Mena lied to them and that they were being devious in their later decision to change some of the original terms after they were released. I personally don’t think this is the case. Granted that I don’t know the people involved, their concern over having to switch over to a paying model seems to be genuine. But switch they must if they are to survive – this too I understand. As a software developer, I can understand the problems they face. On the other hand, I do think that charging US$ 100 for a personal package which doesn’t give that much more than the free version is a bit excessive as well – especially given that the new release of MT 3.0 does not have that many features added. Yes, there are a lot of changes behind the scenes that will mean more goodies in the future – but nothing for your average user just yet.

Then again, on the other hand, this *is* called a Developer Edition and is aimed mainly at the developer and so the average user shouldn’t really get bent out of shape – not till they do the public release and continue to charge them large sums of money for not many features added :p It really seems to be one of those grey areas that cannot be really categorized as one or the other – there are too many variables … not to mention all the heated emotion that gets in the way of cool thinking. But I do wish Ben and Mena best of luck in trying to take MT along on a new direction.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ll switch to something new soon. I’m looking at a few alternatives at the moment but the one I choose must meet a few criteria that is important to *me*. What are they? Well, first of all, it should be able to import my existing MT entries and comments :p Then, it should support the Blogger API or the MetaBlog API so that I can connect to it via Blog or BlogMan to continue to post offline. Next, it should support comment spam filtering and blacklisting since I seem to get a lot of that stuff :p Finally, it would be nice if it supported a few of the template tags and the calendar feature from MT that I kinda like … but that last is not a must 🙂

Of course, before people suggest (does anybody even read these entries anymore anyway? :p) alternatives, I guess I must mention what I’m looking at, at the moment 🙂 The top three contenders on my list are: WordPress, Nucleus and b2evolution. Each one has strengths and weaknesses but I believe all of them are open source projects and so hopeufully will not suffer the same fate as MT. There is a fourth contender, ExpressionEngine, but that is a commercial application. However, they do seem to be taking advantage of the current furore over MT and are running a sort of competition where the first 1000 people to send them an e-mail get a copy of ExpressionEngine for free :p

Incidentally, I’m not looking at the core or base install of WordPress or Nucleus :p Instead, I’m looking at Wuh Wuh, a souped up version of WordPress, and Nucleus Extreme. I’ll keep you posted as to my findings 🙂

Return of the Prodigal

Yes, I am not dead …yet :p And I had to think long and hard about where to post this one since my main blog at The Developer’s Corner has been inactive as well for the longest of times. I finally decided that the post should go here since this post has nothing at all to do with development but the original dilemma arose from the fact that I did have a lot to say about why I haven’t done any development work in a while :p Ah well, guess there are always going to be such cases where you can’t figure out which blog gets the post when you have multiple blogs. Maybe I should go back to a combined blog? This might actually make sense when I combine Blog and BlogMan (whoops, that sounds like a development related statement … see what I mean?)

Anyway, the situation has been like this – my routine has changed so much that I really haven’t had much time for blog entries .. there is always just too much to do. So I kinda stopped making SM entries and then The Developer’s Corner went into neglect as well since I didn’t have time to code any longer either. I’ve been working on two different fronts – one is my regular job and the other is a separate project that I got involved in as part of my job. This second project has gradually taken up more and more of my time until during the the last month I was even working weekends to get things ready for the Sri Lankan elections which were to be held at the beginning of April. The elections have come and gone and things have calmed down a bit now but I still don’t seem to find the time to update my blog or to do any coding since the two jobs continue to go on. I have decided to try and make more regular updates though since otherwise my two blogs that I seemed to be so religious about updating would just die a natural death. However, I think I really must think about combining The Developer’s Corner and SM. This actually would allow me to make more frequent updates and still try to somewhat keep things on topic since the topic can once again be anything at all :p

So what have I actually been doing? Well just last week, my friend Robin and I were discussing old DOS games – games that we both used to enjoy but hadn’t played in ages. The nostalgic trip down memory lane got me thinking about some of the games I really loved and suddenly, I had a hankering to play some of them. I’d already tried to play a few them, like Gods, on Windows XP but had found the game to be slow and I didn’t really feel like going through that again. However, I suddenly realized that there might be a virtual machine or an emulator around for DOS which might allow me to play the games as they were meant to! My search resulted in me finding DOSBox – an emulator for DOS on Windows (as well as a host of other platforms actually …) – just what I was looking for! My tests with DOSBox were less than satisfactory though since Gods still seemed to run much slower than I remembered. However, I did bag a whole bunch of old DOS games from the Web since there were a lot of abandonware sites which had all my old favourites for download 🙂

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across an Amiga emulator – WinUAE. I have no clear recollection as to how that happened now. I realized after some reading that all I needed to run Amiga games was this emulator, an Amiga ROM image and some other little bits and pieces which I was able to get together fairly quickly. I found that there was a whole slew of Amiga games available for download and that all of my old DOS favourites were there in Amiga format too 🙂 Unfortunately, my first attempts at getting an Amiga game running on WinUAE weren’t very successful but this was mostly due to my total lack of knowledge of both Amigas and WinUAE. I finally stumbled upon the correct way to set things up in WinUAE so that I can run a game and my first game was Deliverance. I was so hooked by the game (yes, even though it was ancient :p) that I played it till about midnight on Friday!

Over the weekend, I perfected my configuration of WinUAE for playing Amiga games and was able to get a few of my old favourites like Gods, Lemmings, The Lost Vikings and Chaos Engine working just fine on it. The game play is as good as ever, there is no speed difference and the best thing of all, the games take only a few megs on my hard disk! What more can one ask for? :p

Comment spam – what next?

Interesting … today, I stumbled across a whole discussion about comment spam when I went over to the Movable Type site to see if there were any updates to it. I’d mentioned a while back about the strange comments that I’d seen here and how I’d deleted them but couldn’t get the entries to rebuild. The entries not rebuilding was a separate problem (Norton Personal Firewall :p) but the comments turn out to have been comment spam. At that point, it made no sense to me at all as to why somebody would leave a weird comment on my site but I deleted the comments anyway in principle since their site URL always seemed to be a porn something or something like that. I simply assumed that they were trying to get people to visit their site by way of these inane comments. Turns out that it is more complicated than that – most people seem to think that these obnoxious comments are actually a way for these spammers to up their Google ranking!

Now that I knew of the situation, I wanted a solution – some way to thwart these idiots who would try to use my site for their own purposes :p Fortunately, the Movable Type discussion also had a link to a blacklist plugin by a guy named Jay Allen. The plug-in seems to be extremely easy to install – just upload three files, run a web-based configuration and you are done and instead of relying on the not so efficient IP banning, (which I never used with the previous comments I deleted since each comment was from a different IP … ) the blacklist plugin actually scans the comment content to see if the comment is acceptable or not. Of course, I haven’t had a major problem with comment spammers (I’ve probably got less than ten spam comments) and so probably need not worry about this at all. However, I hear some people have gotten "hundreds" of comment spam for one entry and so I want to make sure that I don’t end up in the same situation. So I’ve installed the blacklist plugin and will now await eagerly to see if it does indeed work or if it will block all my usual commenters out too :p

Back at last, back at last …

Yes, I’m finally back … actually, I’ve been back for a while but there have been problems but where to begin? 🙂 Guess I’ll begin at the beginning itself and then go on till the end as I think the White King said to Alice :p I initially was away from SM, my other blog and general coding due to the fact that I’d met somebody online and I was spending every moment I was online with her 🙂 Then she decided to move to Sri Lanka in August and we got married soon after she got here and then there was a whole heap of other things to do. My wife Laurie is not a Muslim nor is she a Sri Lankan and so, my parents were dead set against the marriage – but to be fair by them, I didn’t tell them of the marriage beforehand. I sprung it on them after the fact so that they wouldn’t be able to guilt trip me into reconsidering – cowardly? Probably :p Anyway, my parents wanted to have nothing to do with Laurie or I and so we had to find our own place.

I’d anticipated this and had already rented out a house and had also gotten time off for two weeks from work and so Laurie and I were able to spend the time setting up house and attending to the hundreds of little things that needed to be attended to. The daily nitty-gritties are probably going to be way too exhaustively detailed for me to go into right here but if you are interested, you could always take a look at Laurie’s Sri Lanka blog since she has detailed everything that happened every day since she got to Sri Lanka 🙂 Anyway, since we were at a new house and had no telephone (except for my cellular) let alone dial-up access, I was again offline for several weeks except for the brief periods I had to come into work to attend to various things.

Then I finally got back to work around two weeks ago but still was not able to attend to my blogs since I had so much piled up work that needed to be attended to – among other things. In addition to that, I discovered that SM had a problem – I could not rebuild old entries and I wasn’t sure what was wrong. The network at work in the meantime had become extremely slow (I am still trying to figure out what the cause is – whether it’s a file sharer or one of those all too frequent worms) and so I was unable to do much online stuff such as trying to debug my Movable Type installation for SM. I tried replacing all the Movable Type files in case I’d made some sort of a mistake when I switched hosts (which I’d done just before Laurie came down BTW), I tried moving the Movable Type scripts to a different location on my server, I tried playing with different configuration options, I referred to the MT forums for days on end on an extremely slow connection – all to no avail.

I had installed Norton Personal Firewall just after I’d gotten back from vacation/marriage but I had not thought to test out rebuilding SM without the firewall. Or at least, I’d remember when I wasn’t at my computer that I should test without the firewall but never do it. Finally, I hit upon an MT forum entry which specifically mentioned that rebuilding and other activities on MT get affected when Norton Personal Firewall is on and how to get around it – disable the popup ad prevention feature in Norton Firewall. I did that and finally I was able to use my MT installation fully again – and this was on Sunday 🙂 Incidentally, the reason that I needed to rebuild all my old entries was because somebody kept on leaving strange and apparently pointless comments on one of my entries. I still have no idea what that was about .. unless they wanted people to visit their URL and while the comments and the URL’s were usually the same, the IP the comments came from was always different. Anyway, I deleted all these comments but could not rebuild the old entries due to the problems I had but now all that is done.

And yes, I’m back and hopefully will be posting more and will also start working on all those coding projects too but since I will not have Net access except from work, things are still going to be a bit slow – I still need to find a way to update my main site since that’s updated via Blog – I guess I should move my Blog installation to my work machine … So many things to do .. so little time :p

Raving rant ….

Sometimes things just keep on getting weirder – or maybe I am paranoid and imagine that they are weird to begin with :p I usually do my blogging in the morning before I leave for work but for the last couple of days, I can’t dial-in to my ISP at all from home in the mornings. Enemy action? Probably not – but I immediately start thinking that it’s weird that I have no dial-up in the mornings now but things are fine in the evening – at least it was yesterday. Maybe the guy in charge just sleeps through the night and does not get up till about 8 o’clock or so and by that time, I’m already at work. Another mystery to be solved … one of these days :p

I use BlogMan to make these posts since it gives me the familiar interface of Blog and provides spell-check and a thesaurus while letting me post to my Movable Type installation on my server. However, I discovered yesterday that I can’t retrieve older posts from the server (posts that I did not make from this machine – otherwise the post would be in BlogMan of course …) because the latest release of Movable Type has changed some of the API functions. Argh! Why can’t they make up their freaking minds in the first place so that I don’t have to keep on updating the code? Now I’ll have to figure out which version of MT is on the server and depending on that, call a different version of the API function – if that is even possible that is!! Sorry, I’m calm now …. and barely frothing at the mouth :p Oh well, another bit of code to do and I just don’t feel like coding. I’d like to roll into a ball and just lie there dreaming and thinking … but oh well, we can’t always have what we want :p