Fungii.com

Hard Disk Failure

My hard drive had a meltdown this morning. The first thing I did was check the warranty. It was a one year warranty and it expired in May '07. Ick! I was a bit bummed, to say the least. While I was unable to recover any of the data on the disk, I did manage to reformat it and get it working again, so it wasn't a complete loss. Still, I think I'll do more regular backups after that mishap.

Test

Just testing some shit, i upgraded my MySQL install...

Movable Type Errors

I kept getting an error in Movable Type, something about renaming my index temp file. Pissed me off because it wasn't consistent, one time it would give me an error, the next time it wouldn't, even though I was doing the exact same fucking thing! It was also giving me this error with comments, apparently. Anyway, by changing the setting in mt.cfg to NoTempFiles 1 seems to have fixed the problem. Sorry about that, I'm sure anybody trying to post a comment on here encountered the same problem. Damn old movable type, I should upgrade someday...

Trackback abusers

Had to turn off the trackback feature on my blog due to spammers hammering my site with their bogus pings. Fuck I hate those cunts. I might turn it back on if I find a reasonable solution, there seems to be a few ways to stop them out there.

Down Time

My website will be down for awhile tomorrow as I'm going to do some work on my comp. I got a TV tuner card I want to install and I got a buncha new fans & shit for the internals. Make it quieter I hope.

MT "nofollow" plugin

I added Movable Type's "nofollow" plugin to my blog tonight and it seems to work. I was surprised they had it working for version 2.661, what I'm still using. I think the "nofollow" attribute will cut down on spam in the long term, but I'm sure the bastards will keep doing it in the short term as there will be plenty of blogs that won't implement it right away, if ever. And the spammers will do their best to find a way around it.

I'm still getting a few comment-spam attempts but none have gotten through since I did the comment-test-question thing for comments. Two days, no spam, woohoo!

New Spam Blocking thing

Well, my attempt at stopping spam using a simple question on th ecomment entry page wasn't entirely successful. My activity log showed that a few attempts were made, but blocked by MT-Blacklist. None got through though, and it looks like there were a lot fewer attempts in the log than usual so it does seem to help. I wonder if they're bypassing the question somehow or if their bot is programmed to answer simple questions like that somehow. Or maybe they have some poor bastard in a third world country spamming me by hand.

My added field seems to have kinda screwed up my preview screen as well, I get an error at the bottom of the page. And it rejects any attempt to post from the preview screen as I don't have my test question on that page. Mmmm, not sure what file to edit to get it on there either.

Update: you can now post from the preview window, though I still get the error at the bottom of the page when I first load the preview page. I think I know what's causing it, too tired to fix it right now.

Update: found the solution here. Error gone, sleep now.

My brain hurts

I was trying to do a little spam fighting by using a new field in the comment page, and I could not get it to work! I kept editing comments.pm but none of my changes seem to take. Finally, I came across a bit of info that MT-Blacklist overides comments.pm with its own post() function. Argh! So I edited that and it worked right away. Oh yeah, it was the file MTBlPost.pm and the function was comment_post_hdlr_266() for my version of MT. So I guess I'll see if this makes any difference in the deluge of spam I get everyday. It's a very simple question, so it will probably only stop bots and not a real person. Unless it's a person that failed kindergarten.

Moved My "Last Five" thing to the sidebar

I moved my "last five" thing to the right sidebar and now my page seems to display somewhat normally in Firefox and IE6. Now I just need to do something about my ugly banner div at the top. BTW my "last five" is just a list of the last five songs, movies, games, books and TV shows that I've heard/watched/read/played/ignoredWhileDoingLaundry. I haven't kept it up to date very much lately as evidenced by the hockey game that's still on there from last year under TV. The music list keeps pretty current as I have a plugin [doSomething] in Winamp that updates my list automatically for me.

Firefox

I downloaded Firefox today and saw that this page still looks totallly screwed up in that browser. Plus most of the customization things I made in the sidebar don't work. Worse, I was messing around with the html and css source and ended up wrecking the way it was displayed in both browsers! Ick, I managed to get it hacked together so it looks reasonable in both browsers again. Although the banner at the top is pretty FUBAR in FireFox. Oh well, I'll work on it, later.

Customize

I added the customize option over in the right hand pane. »»»»»

You can change the font family, color, and font size of the blog entries on the main page here. Plus you can make this main pane bigger or smaller. I only tested it in IE6, don't have any other browsers installed yet. I know my page looks a little funky in Firefox, but last time I tried to make it work in that browser I just couldn't manage it. Might be easier with a newer version though.

Spam be Damned

In an effort to cut down on spam, I've closed comments on posts over 31 days old. This should help I think, as a lot of spam gets dumped on old entries that most people aren't going to comment on anyway, right? Me thinks so.

Testing Image Magick...

MT is back up!

I finally managed to get my Movable Type databases converted and working! Woohoo! I had to compile Sleepycat's source code for their Berkeley database so I could get at one file - db_upgrade.exe. That was the key to get this damn thing working again. I had to convert a bunch of files, took awhile. I guess I should have tried scripting the process at some point. Anyway, after converting the database, I ran the db2mysql script from MT. And despite a couple of false starts when it went looking in directories that had changed names, it worked like a charm and me blog is back in business.

More DNS problems

Egads man! After thinking everything was back to normal this morning, I came home to find everything was still totally screwed up. My domain was still pointing to some marketing company. Argh! After messing around with it half the night, I realized my scondary DNS server was to blame, namely secondary.org. Their web server seems conveniently out of order so I could not log onto their website to fix the problem. So I signed up for another free secondary nameserver, changed my domain info to point to the new server and voilà, it works again! At least it seems to. [brood] I'm hoping this is the end to this fiasco. I'm using xname.org as my secondary server, btw.

Granitecanyon DNS RIP

My domain is up again! Woohoo! I was using granitecanyon.com as my free dns nameserver, but they suddenly decided to stop providing that service without notifying their users which caused my web page to disappear from the face of this earth. The weird thing was that I could access my web pages for the last two weeks while other people couldn't at all. Until last night that is, when I got redirected to some marketing company when I tried to come here. I signed up with EveryDNS.net and pointed my dns queries there and just a few hours later, my page seems to be working again. Yea!

Mobile Messaging!

Looks like I can now blog from my Blackberry. Cool. I'm still not used to this keyboard, seems a bit different from my old 950.

Wasn't so impressed this morning tho. Went to use the browser on this thing and after hanging for five minutes, it gave me an error message. Tried to get Tom to help me but he gave me the Rogers support number. They were of no help, tho theu managed to use up an hour of my time. Eventually Shane showed me where the reset button is and that seemed to fix my problem.

Canadian Election Feed

I setup an rss amalgamation thingy for the Canadian election, just a collection of rss feeds from people covering the election. Most of which I collected from here. I'll probably have to start a second page because the first one is getting too big. I'll put it in the rss section of my links page. Hopefully somebody will find it useful besides me. I didn't sort the feeds in any way, so you might find stuff you agree with and whole whack you don't. ;)

Radio Blog

I added a radio blog thing at the bottom of the page. Watcha think?

Wordpress installed

I managed to get a copy of Wordpress installed, finally. The first install was taking between 20 - 45 seconds to respond to my mouse-clicks on the admin panel. So I reinstalled it, same thing. After installing it a third time and seeing no improvement, I downloaded the latest build and tried that one. And it seems to work. Woohoo. I'm not going to switch over just yet, too much work and I'm really lazy. ;) Just going to play around with it for awhile, see if I can get the hang of it.

Rounded Corners

These rounded corners aren't working! :(

Upgrading MT

Trying to upgrade to MT 2.661. It's fucked up all my plugins and crap, as per usual. Will try to get it back to normal eventually. I needed to upgrade because I wanted to install the spam filter thing that only works with 2.6X versions of MT. What a pia.

Update: finally got most of my stuff back to normal. My plugins work again. And I installed the MT Blacklist plugin so hopefully I won't be getting so much spam anymore. I was really getting sick of deleting that shit every day.

Little x's where my pictures should be

Looks like Shaw's web server is flaking out again. If my pictures aren't showing up in your browser, then that's why. [I try to use their included homepage space for my photos, saves bandwidth and I think their servers are faster, when they're up!] Pisses me off though, their e-mail and webpage servers have been really unreliable as of late. Funny, their main page is working fine, just not member pages.

Test

Just testing an Image::Magick script. Pay no heed!

Computer Problems

Holy crap, I was offline for three days because my CPU died and my ISP never changed my IP. Cool, I don't have to mess around changing my zone file and shit. My old cpu was a 1.7 gig AMD chip that I baught last May, but it was on special so there was only a 30 day warranty! Bogus. So I replaced it with a 2.4 gig version, this one coming with a one year warranty. It better last longer than the old one, dammit.

Messageboard

My old messageboard wasn't working for ages, it crashed one day with a bad database error and I was never able to get it back up. So I installed the phpBB messageboard software and it seems to be working ok. Check it out if you're bored [ha], although there's nothing there right now as I just installed it. Actually, the last one didn't get much traffic either, but then again it was crap that never worked properly anyhow. Oh, I'm so tired.

My RSS Feeds

I've pretty well finished working on my scripts for RSS feeds. I know it probably would have been a lot easier to just use an rss aggregator but it was kinda fun figuring out how to do it with perl. Kinda. The only problem I'm not sure I dealt with is when a feed is unavailable, it causes an error. The first time it happened I was going through my scripts trying to find out what the hell went wrong because it was working fine five minutes earlier. I wrote some code to catch the error and just skip feeds that don't work, but I don't know if it actually works. The feeds should refresh when the html file is older than one hour. The entertainment and news ones have basically nothing in them, I was just using them to test stuff.

So I just need to tweak some things and add more feeds. And sleep. I really need to go to sleep.

Update: nope, the script still crashes if the rss page fails to load. Damn, I'll have to work on that. I think I know where I went wrong. I only checked to see if it got the feed, but the problem probably occured when it tries to parse the faulty xml. Hopefully the parsing routine returns false [0] if it fails and I can use that to skip to the next feed. I hope. Nope, that still didn't help! Damn. Loading the bad xml url, I get "An invalid character was found in text content." Mmmmm, how to get around this?

Perl

I'm getting a perl database error, an error window keeps popping up saying "perl caused an invalid page fault in DB_FILE.DLL". Groan.

Update: I simply re-installed the DB_FILE package using PPM and it seems to have fixed the error. When errors go away that easily, it makes me a little nervous. I'm used to banging my head against the wall for hours till I find the answer staring me in the face at two o'clock in the morning. And it's usually something really obvious that I should have noticed from the very start. Oh well, I guess I lucked out this time.

RSS Feeds

I've been messing with my RSS feeds page today. It could still use some tweaking but it's getting a bit better. Check it out. I got a form set up for adding feeds. Now I think I'm going to have to add specialized pages for different topics. And I think it still needs to be streamlined a bit to fit more snugly onto one page. The urls Blogdex places in their descriptions screws up my formatting as well. I wish they wouldn't do that.

Tracking Visitors

It's funny how I get a flurry of hits on certain subjects. First it was on the error involving MSN Messenger. I was getting a bunch of hits on this thing after making a couple entries on how I couldn't even solve the issue and had to rely on Trillian to do the IM thing. I wish I had the answers to help these lost souls. Too bad Microsoft couldn't be bothered to fix it themselves, their help on this problem was less than useless.

Then there's the Terra boot story. They're caving to pressure and pulling the ads. Lamers. I thought the ads were just fine. And I've seen a lot worse as far as having scantilly clad women hawking wares. C'est la vie, I guess.

Weather Script

I fixed my weather script for like the millionth time. I think they keep changing their page just to piss me off.

I'm still alive!

I haven't been posting much lately, it's just been work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, etc... Not terribly exciting, sorry, I'll try to have a more exciting life to entertain y'all. :)

DNS Problems

Yeaaaah, my web site is back up! It's been down since Sunday because the DNS nameserver I was using conked out. I definitely need a secondary nameserver set up. Hope this one stays up for awhile...

I would like to kill everyone. Except you. Obviously.

This guy has collected a bunch of snippets of conversation overheard on the London tube. Some of it is hilarious, and strangely familiar.

So, anyway, on his deathbed he suggests that I buy the lawnmower off him. I said no.

via Metafilter

Broken Saints

I've heard this is a good online comic book thingy as well, but I don't have time to check it out right now. Maybe tomorrow. Goodnight.

The Killer

Cool online comic book The Killer. [uses Flash] Unfinished, but still worth checking out. I read the first book, 12 episodes. Good stuff, wish there was more like it on the web. Reminds me of some old Heavy Metal comics. Rarely do I like sound with web pages, but it actually works well with this presentation to set the mood. The navigation, on the other hand, sucked.

via Metafilter

Blogs Canada

I just came across a site called BlogsCanada : Officially Unofficial. It looks like they're trying to index Canadian blogs. Which is cool, I'm always trying to find Canadian blogs for a Canadian perpective on things. I like their layout, it looks like an official Canadian Government site at first glance and I'm like WTF the government is indexing blogs now? They just might get in shit for this. Though, they shouldn't cause you know that would suck. Didn't somebody get in shit awhile back for using the Canadian flag on their site? I seem to remember the government was pissed off cause it was their oficial symbol. Silly.

RSS News Feeds

I started messing around with rss news feeds and I'm working on building a page with a few feeds on it. It's definately a work in progress but check it out if you want. [it only has MetaFilter on it so far...]

Damn Floats

Messed around with foating DIVs, trying to get them to work in Mozilla. I give up. They work fine in IE, but Mozilla seems to want to drop to the next line no matter what you do. Bogus. I changed the way my last five thingy is displayed. It uses one div and the contents change by replacing its node via the DOM thingy. Much better than the hiding/unhiding thing I was doing before with Javascript and stylesheets. The div stays in the same position all the time, where before I had to guess with negative positioning, and that would get all screwed up every time the content changed. The only problem with this solution is that it seems to take longer to load. And I ran into a weird thing where when you use the DOM to insert text, it inserts exactly what you enter without parsing HTML tags. It makes sense to me now, but it was suprising when I first saw the raw HTML pop up on my screen.

Mozilla

Ricardo told me my page looked screwed up in Netscape, the bastard. So I downloaded Mozilla 1.4 and checked it out. It's not too bad. The sidebar kicks down to the bottom instead of staying on the side. That might have something to do with the comment thingy in the sidebar. Or the size ratios. Dunno. And my last five thingy at the top doesn't display right either. I think I know how to fix that, but it would take a lot of work because of the way it gets updated using a script. Too much work for right now. And then there's the i-frame at the bottom of the sidebar that seems to disappear in Mozilla. I think it's there somewhere, there are two sets of scrollbars on the left-side and bottom of the page. Weird. Oh well, I'll try to check compatability with Mozilla in the future, Ricardo you little whiner. ♠

Individual Archive Template

The single entry pages were having problems with the pop-up windows used for full sized images. I figured it out, it was because the javascript file wasn't being loaded in the archives. I edited the template and everything works again. Boy, I'm good.

When I Am King

I read this online comic this morning and I thought it was pretty damn hilarious. Good stuff.

New Motherboard

Here's my new motherboard and CPU. It's like all purply and shit.

Building the Machine

Tearing out the old parts, putting in nice, shiny new parts.

Back from the dead

I finally got my blog back up and working. It all started last week when I saw a good deal on an AMD 1700+ at Memory Express. It was too good to pass up, so I went for it. [chip & MB for $180] I also picked up a new video card while I was there, an MSI Ti4200. [$190] My old system was a Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 and an original Nividia TNT. [16 meg] So I really needed a new system, nothing seemed to run anymore.

Anyway, I installed the new MB, chip and video card, fired it up and as it was doing the 'found new hardware' thing, it shut down. Fried my power supply. Guess these new motherboards suck a lot more power than the old ones. Next day, got a new power supply. [2 fans, 350 watts] Installed it, fired it up, everything works. For awhile.

Shortly after installing drivers for my motherboard, explorer informed me that it couldn't read my DVD-rom drive. [Retry, Cancel?] Windows knew there was a drive there, it just couldn't read any of the media. I guess the laser died. Back to the computer store. Got a new DVD-rom/CD-burner [$90] and 512 meg DDR ram [$80].

By the time I had everything back up and running, my ISP had changed my IP so I had to update my zone file and wait for it to take. Took all weekend, just came back up today, Monday.

And that is what I've been up to the last week. My computer is running much faster, but it's crashing a lot [driver problems I think] and holy shit does it ever run hot! It's like a part time computer, full time space heater.

I'm a stubborn bastard

Got most of my blog entries back. My database entries were lost so I had to try to import my archives with MT's import function. MT won't just import straight HTML files tho, they want them formatted in a certain way. I tracked down a script that purported to do this conversion, but it didn't work. I seemed to get it working but it was real buggy and I lost a few posts and all the comments. What a pain. Oh well.

Going to take a break from this...

...before my head explodes!